Subject To Change: Season 3
by JadeEye
Summary: Clearly,there's something you expected me to know, and I don't know it. What's going on?" The more things change, the more they stay the same for Moon and Mask in this final installment of Subject to Change.
1. Chapter 1

**A/N**: Tremendous thank you to Jade and to all you patient readers. I am very sorry for the long wait.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon or the quotation below from Carolyn Forche's _The Angel of History_.

**Date:** 9.11.11

**Warnings:** Language.

**Summary**: "Clearly, there's something you expected me to know, and I don't know it. What's going on?" The more things change, the more they stay the same for Moon and Mask in this final installment to Subject to Change.

C

_The way back is lost, the one obsession._

_The worst is over._

_The worst is yet to come._

– Carolyn Forche, "The Testimony of Light"

C

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter One: Mikai

C

The little girl was blonde. It was weird. Her mom–at least Mikai assumed it was her mom from the way the little girl was half hiding her face in the woman's skirt as she peered up at him–was dark-haired, and so was the boy in the Juuban Junior High uniform who had come in with them. Maybe she was adopted?

The boy cleared his throat.

Mikai lifted his eyes from the girl to him, then to the mother. He felt a little sheepish, especially when he saw the slightly uneasy expression on the woman's face. He had probably made her think he was some sort of pedophile, staring at her kid like that. Or maybe she was just put off by all his piercings. Mothers in particular tended to be, as though their children's minds would be corrupted just by seeing him in all his blue-haired, metal-studded glory.

"Sorry," he said, offering his most charming smile–the one that _didn't_ show his tongue ring. "You're the white Honda, right?" He read the name off the paperwork he had on the counter in front of him. "Iwara?"

"Yes." The woman nodded, pulling out her checkbook, then glanced toward the mismatched group of chairs and magazine-strewn coffee table a few feet away. "Buji, could you take Mina over there…?"

"Sure." With one last semi-suspicious glance at Mikai, the boy took the little girl's hand. "C'mon, Mi-chan, let's sit over here while Mom finishes up, okay? I have some paper in my backpack, d'you wanna draw?"

"You can change the channel on that if you want," Mikai said, nodding at the TV in the corner. It was currently set to the news, showing an update on the cleaning efforts at the nuclear plant that had been damaged during the earthquake last month. He watched the grim-faced scientist being interviewed for a second, then turned his attention back to the woman. "Sorry, Iwara-san. Uh…okay, it looks like the problem is just your rear wheel bearings."

"Is that serious?" the woman asked anxiously. She was clutching her purse tightly. "That noise the wheels were making–"

Mikai smiled reassuringly. "Let's just say it's a good thing you brought them in to get fixed. Wheel bearings can mess up your brakes and steering you don't get 'em checked in time."

She nodded, wide-eyed, and he pulled out several forms and a pen for her, setting them in front of her and explaining the repairs the car would need and how long it would take. It was a minor repair, but the woman was listening intently, nodding seriously as he explained it, like he was describing some risky full-body operation of one of her children. He recognized the behavior, just as he had recognized the tight clutching of her purse: she was an anxious single-mother type. The fact that she had only just now been able to bring her car in for repairs when he was fairly certain the damage must have been caused during the tsunami–water had probably gotten in the bearings and contaminated the grease in the seals–probably meant that she'd been saving up a while.

"Hey, Nobu," he called into the back room, "lemme see the receipt for order three-six-five before you print it out, all right?"

Nobu poked his head out the door. "It's ready when you are, boss. I'm about to leave. Mei already locked up in back."

"Great, thanks." Mikai smiled again at Iwara-san, who had just finished the last form. "I'll be right back." He ducked into the back room, scanning the invoice form, scrolling down to the total. He clicked on it and retyped it so that it was half of the original amount.

Nobu laughed under his breath. "Another one, boss?" Peeling off his coveralls, he craned his neck to peer out at the counter. "At least this one's pretty."

Mikai just winked and pressed the print button as Nobu left through the back door, snickering.

Plucking the invoice from the printer, he slid it onto the counter in front of the woman – who, he had to agree with Nobu, wasn't bad-looking at all. She didn't have quite that run-down look a lot of single moms (his own included) had, and he thought a lot of that was probably thanks to her son, who was now making balloon cheeks and faces at his sister where they sat in the corner, making her giggle and clap pudgy hands. The sight gave him both a smile and an ache. His gaze went again to the TV, which hadn't been changed from the nuclear plant coverage. Darien hadn't called or even texted from America to see if Mikai had made it okay through the quake. Not that the quake had really affected them too badly in their area, and Darien would have known that from seeing the coverage, but still…

"Sir? Is that everything?" The woman was holding out the check she had just torn from her checkbook.

Mikai took it. "Yep! We'll call you when the repairs are done."

"Okay. Thank you." Looking relieved, she quickly backed away from the counter, going to her kids. "All right, let's go, you two–"

She broke off as the ground beneath them shook.

Dismay threw Mikai's insides against his ribcage. _Not again_. He automatically bent his knees to brace himself, and just as automatically stumbled his way around the counter to where the lady and kids were.

"Come on, come on!" he shouted over the sound of the hydraulic lifts groaning and metal crashing outside the office. The boy had already pushed his sister under the coffee table and was now covering his mom as she crawled under too. Mikai put a hand on the boy's head and shoved him under it as well, then squeezed in himself. The boy's elbow was digging into his collarbone, and someone's shoe was digging under his ribcage; he wondered if they could feel his heart thundering in his chest.

The TV crashed onto the floor behind them. Mikai winced – he had just bought it to replace the one that fell _last_ month–and then winced again, realizing he could feel pain stinging along the hand he had stretched over the kids' heads. Debris from the TV must have cut him or something.

But that was the worst of it. The ground stopped moving beneath them, and Mikai realized that the quake probably hadn't even lasted thirty seconds. He carefully eased free of the elbow and the shoe and wriggled out from under the table, then helped the others out.

"That wasn't so bad, was it?" he said reassuringly, for Iwara was holding the blonde girl even more tightly than she had held her purse, and the little girl's face was drained of color. Her eyes were wide as she clutched the back of her brother's shirt. "Probably not even a four."

"You need to secure your furniture better, mister," said the boy, looking at the toppled television set and then out the window at the garage, where various tools had fallen and lay scattered on the cement floor.

"Bujiro," scolded Iwara, but there was no fire in her voice. She got carefully to her feet, still holding the four-year-old. She smoothed back her hair unconsciously, then did the same to the boy. She looked then at Mikai, and her eyes widened. "You're hurt!"

Mikai's brows rose. He glanced down at himself. His arm was injured, a shallow but surprisingly bloody laceration extending from just above his wrist to just below his elbow. He frowned and crossed around the counter again, looking for a clean cloth amidst the mess of fallen papers.

"You probably shouldn't go outside just yet," he said as he searched. "There might be aftershocks." He found a box of tissues and grabbed a couple, pressing them against the cut. "Lemme get the emergency radio–"

"Your head," said a little voice, and Mikai looked up from rummaging for the broadband radio to see the blonde child pointing at him. He lifted a hand to his face…and touched wetness. He took his hand away and saw blood on his fingertips.

"There's a cut. On your forehead." Iwara pointed gingerly and took a step closer, grabbing a handful of tissue to press against the skin above his eye. The girl, carried in her other arm, blinked seriously at him.

"Mommy, you can use my bow." She reached up to untie the big red bow in her bright hair. Iwara put her down, and the girl handed her the long strip of red fabric, looking at her, then Mikai, solemnly. "You should tie it around to stop the bleeding. Right, nii-san?"

Her brother had found the radio Mikai had been looking for and was now tuning it. "Right," he said distractedly.

"I can do it," Mikai said as Iwara pulled the tissues from his head, peered at the wound, and lifted the bow to tie it around his head. She tsked, ignoring his attempts to take it, and wound it gently around his scalp. For the second time, Mikai felt a fleeting ache. He felt like he was being mothered, and it felt…nice.

Iwara finished knotting the makeshift bandage around his head and stepped back. The little girl craned her neck back to examine her mother's work and said solemnly, "You look like a ninja."

"Sweet." Mikai cracked a grin. Then there was a flash of white in his vision, and he turned to see, of all things, a cat streaking across the room and into the little girl's legs.

"Kitty!" she shrieked happily, picking it up. Or trying to–it was scrambling to get up into her arms, too, but neither of them was quite managing the feat; its hind legs still scratched at the floor as she hugged its upper half.

Mikai did a double-take at the cat, then the door. "How did it – ?"

Iwara looked equally bemused. "We're never sure how he does it. He always manages to find Mina no matter where we are."

"Even the time we flew to Osaka," muttered the brother, and then there was a squawk of static from the radio he was fiddling with.

"–subway is running again," the voice coming out of it said. "Seismologists do not expect any further activity. But authorities warn citizens to stay alert and have emergency supplies prepared in case…"

"So we can go home?" The boy looked appealingly at his mom.

Iwara bit her lip. "I think so." She looked at Mikai. "Do you want us to walk you to the hospital? Is there anyone you can call?"

Mikai felt that pang again, but grinned and gestured at his forehead. "What, the hospital? For this? This is nothing. I'll just head home and disinfect it."

Iwara bit her lip again. "It's a head injury, I really don't think you should be walking alone…"

Mikai was touched. "I appreciate the concern, Iwara-san, but I'm a grown man. I'll be fine. Really. I only live a few blocks away."

Iwara was weakening, he could tell. But then Mina crossed dimpled arms and said, "We can walk him home, Mommy."

Mikai swallowed a snort at her authoritative tone, and the boy rolled his eyes, but Iwara looked decided. "We _will_ walk you home. Just in case you start feeling woozy during the walk and need us to call an ambulance."

So that was how Mikai found himself being walked home by a four-year-old, a twelve-year-old, their mother, and their cat. It was a good thing the streets were as good as deserted thanks to the earthquakes; he couldn't imagine what someone passing by would think if they saw them all walking together. Possibly they would think the tall, bleeding man with the earrings was somehow holding the little family hostage.

"You really didn't have to do this," he said one last time as he climbed up his front steps, taking out his keys. "But thank you." As he fit his key into the lock, he tried to remember just how messy his living room was. Did he have old beer cans or any of his boxers lying out? He hadn't done dishes in a while…

But it didn't really matter; his adoptive mother had drilled manners into him too fiercely for him not to offer. "Would you like to come in? I could offer you some soda, juice…?" _Maybe? _He wasn't sure if he had any juice. Four-year-olds could drink Mountain Dew, right?

"Oh, no, we couldn't impose." Iwara stepped backward, down the steps, Mina clutching her hand. "Just as long as you're sure you're all right…?"

For a minute, it occurred to Mikai to say that he wasn't. That no, he was really feeling kind of unsteady, and maybe he shouldn't be left alone, so maybe they could come in and just have dinner with him, maybe watch some TV or play a board game? Then propriety caught up and smothered the loneliness he hadn't realized he felt until just now, and he heard himself say, "I am. Thanks again for walking me."

"Thank _you_ for…" Here Iwara paused, looking a little unsure of what to say.

"Shoving us under the table," Buji finished with a quirk of his lips.

Mikai grinned. "Any time." There was a weight at his leg then, suddenly, and he looked down to see the little girl hugging his knee.

"Thanks, mister," she said simply, then, dragging her cat by the tail–only now, as it peered up at Mikai, did he notice that it had the funkiest, ugliest bald spot he'd ever seen nestled between its creepy blue eyes–retreated back to her mother's leg.

Then they left. And as he made his way into his dark living room, Mikai, despite himself, couldn't help but wish that he'd taken the creepy route after all and asked them to stay.

C

Two o'clock that morning found him in a club in Roppongi, nursing his third bottle of lukewarm _jizake_. The band–a group of wannabe college kids that hadn't sounded that great to begin with–had ended their set and were slumming in the crowd. The DJ who had taken over sucked. Plus the social pickings were slim. The only people who went out the night of an earthquake were people just desperate not to be alone (he wasn't too proud to realize that he was one of these) or the ones who were too out of it, either from drinks or drugs or sheer ignorance, to have noticed that there had been an earthquake that evening.

Even with so few people as there were, though, there were enough to create a press and crush on the dance floor, to squeeze you up against other people and leave you damp with each others' sweat. Mikai found himself thus pressed up against a girl who was trying to tangle her tongue ring with his. She was drunk, he could taste it, or maybe that was the alcohol on his own tongue he was tasting. Maybe it was that sour taste, or the painful tug of the ring in his tongue, or even the sudden memory of the little girl with her bright hair and big red bow, that suddenly had him blinking, looking blearily around the crowded club. What the hell was he doing?

He took his hands out from under the girl's shirt, untangled his tongue ring from hers, and left. The trip home was a little blurry; as he unlocked his door there was a nastiness to his mouth that made his think he might have blown chunks once or twice along the way. He stumbled inside and to his bathroom. Off came the jacket, the wife-beater, the oil- and sweat-stiffened jeans. By then the shower water was billowing steam, and he got in and scrubbed away the gel, the grime, the smell of smoke and sweat and sex, the puke from his tongue and teeth.

By the time he was done, his head was drooping against the tile. He managed to turn off the water and wrap a towel around his waist. He walked out into the living room, trying to remember if his flannel pajama pants were clean, and slipped in a puddle of freezing water.

_Bam!_ He slammed to the floor on his bare butt. His teeth rattled in his jaw, his vision shook, and his first thought was that somehow he'd burst a pipe using so much water in his shower and it had leaked into his apartment.

Then he blinked and saw a gigantic block of ice sitting in the middle of his living room.

With a girl frozen inside it.

It was like one of those souvenirs you could buy at science museums, the kind with insects trapped inside cubes of resin or glass. Except there wasn't an insect inside it, there was a _girl_. A life-sized, dark-haired girl in a skimpy, kind of kinky outfit, whose face was frozen in a mask of terror.

"Holy shit." Mikai scrambled backward on the floor. He suddenly felt wide awake and alert. But he was dreaming. He had to be dreaming. There was no other explanation for a frozen girl in his living room.

He relaxed a little with this realization. He was dreaming but aware that he was dreaming; that meant this was a lucid dream, and he knew how to break out of those. He just had to stare fixedly at one thing in the dream, breaking the rapid eye movement that accompanies dreaming, and he would wake up. He narrowed his eyes, focusing on the girl's face. It wasn't the most pleasant thing he could have chosen, considering how terrified she looked, but he felt too guilty looking at any other part of her body, barely covered as it was by that Victoria's Secret version of a school _fuku_.

Her eyes scrunched shut, and she was very pale, almost like a ghost inside the ice. Really, why would he have dreamed of such a girl; she didn't look like anyone he'd ever seen before…

He shook his head and refocused his efforts on the task at hand. But minutes dragged by in a very un-dream-like state, and he was becoming slowly, horribly aware of the fact that this really didn't seem to be a dream.

Then the girl's eyes opened.

"Holy shit. Holy _shit_!" Mikai scrabbled to his feet. Racing across the room, he grabbed the first heavy thing he could find – an old tire iron he had put near the front door to take to the shop.

He smashed it into the ice. Flurries of ice bits spattered onto him, cold against his bare chest. The impact sent cracks spiderwebbing across the ice so that he couldn't see the girl's face anymore, and it made fresh panic surge through.

"C'mon, sweetheart," he mumbled fast under his breath as he swung the iron again. "Stay with me–"

The next blow freed her; he could tell from the strangled gasps and watery coughs and the icy water that splashed onto him. He dug his fingers into the pieces of ice still caked around her face, scrabbling them hastily away. He had managed to make a big hole right in front of her face and neck, though ice still encased the back of her head. Her eyes were closed again now, her lips and eyelids blue with cold, and fresh panic leapt inside him.

"No, c'mon, come _on_–!" There was no breath coming from her mouth or nose. He began to pound at the rest of the ice around her, hammering it until she slumped forward out of it onto his shoulder, wet and colder than anything he'd ever felt before. Two more mighty swings cracked away the ice around her legs, and he rolled her onto the ground, shoving his cupped fists under her rib cage.

Water burst from her mouth. Bubbled out of her as though she was a fountain, and he shoved her, more roughly than he had intended, onto her side so that she could splutter it out. He rubbed hard, brisk circles on her back as it came out – and out and out and out. He couldn't believe such a tiny girl could have so much water in her. She was coughing and crying and vomiting up more water, choking on it as she tried to breathe around the water coming out of her mouth. He pulled her upright and realized she was gripping his arm tightly, her nails digging into his skin. Somehow he didn't think she was frightened, though. Actually, he got the strangest sense she was trying to tell him something.

Whatever it was, she didn't manage to get it out, for as the last of the water finally dribbled out of her, her strength seemed to leave her, too, and she slumped forward. Mikai caught her, his movement jarring, but not dislodging, the grip she had on his arm. Even unconsciousness hadn't slackened it.

Her short, unsteady breaths were cold against his neck. Goosebumps covered his body where her frigid skin touched his. Worse than her cold breath or skin, though, was that despite her coldness she wasn't shivering. Her body was in such shock that her metabolic center wasn't responding properly to generate heat. Automatically he began to chafe her wrists, trying to warm the blood beneath the thin skin, and trying to think of what to do.

The obvious solution was to call emergency services. But he had no idea how he would explain the presence of an unconscious teenage girl in his house, much less one dressed the way she was. Especially because his blood alcohol level wasn't exactly low at the moment…

As he thought this, the girl's outfit faded – literally _faded_ – into something less jail-baitish. A dry sweater and jeans that were already becoming wet from her dripping hair and his, not to mention the puddle of melting ice they were sitting in.

"Shit," Mikai said, beginning to feel like a broken record. When this sort of thing happened in manga, the conscious character stripped the unconscious one of their wet clothes and, er, cuddled to share body warmth. But this girl couldn't be more than sixteen, if that. He couldn't do _that_ with her, even if she wasn't (if her weird clothes were anything to go by) a normal teenage girl.

After a moment more of internal debating, he grabbed an old bandanna from under the couch to tie over his eyes as he put the girl in his bathtub, setting the water to its highest setting. He peeled off her sweater and jeans and nothing else, lifting the bandanna just enough that he could chafe her fingers and toes to see the cyanotic blue receding from the nail beds. He tightened it again as he pulled her out of the bath and put her in a huge old shirt he had gotten from donating blood years ago, although in hindsight this may just have resulted in him accidentally touching the parts he had put the blindfold on in order not to see.

"Sorry, didn't have time to wash the sheets," he said to her motionless face, trying to break the tension with a joke as he would have done if she had been awake. It didn't really help, and he sighed as he struggled to pull the comforter and sheet back one-handed to put her between them.

She didn't move, didn't make a sound, as he piled extra blankets on top of her and adjusted a heating pad beneath her. He put his ear to her mouth again, afraid she had stopped breathing again, but a train of goose bumps sped down the side of his neck, lifted by the faint, icy exhalations from her lips.

"All right," he said, in what was meant to be a decisive voice, and sat down on the edge of the bed. He went to stuff the grimy blindfold into his pocket and realized he didn't have one: he was still wearing only the towel he had knotted around his waist when he got out of the shower. A snort of laughter filled his throat as he remembered how he had landed sprawled on his floor in nothing but that towel. And he had gone to all this effort to preserve _her_ modesty!

He got up, going to kitchen to fill a hot water bottle for her feet. On the way back through the living room he saw a dark shape in the puddle, nearly hidden by one of the coffee table's legs. He scooped it up and examined it as he returned to the bedroom, sliding the bottle under the covers to the girl's feet. It was like some kind of big, clunky costume jewelry, metal shaped like a heart with a fat reddish-purple jewel in the middle of it.

He turned it over in his head, his eyes lifting to scrutinize the girl's pale face, and then reached for the cell phone sitting on the nightstand.

Darien, he texted, and only when the letters ended up coming out **dstin** did he realize how badly his hands were trembling, slippery on the keys. **a grl shjwed up in my apsrtmnt**.

A few minutes passed with no reply, and as he sat there in the lamplight slouched over the phone next to the unconscious girl, he knew that he really hadn't expected one.

Then there was the chime of a received message, and he jolted upright, blinking. He must have dozed off.

**And I care why?** it read.

Fingers trembling now with exhaustion-edged excitement instead of pure panicked adrenaline, Mikai typed a response, something half-coherent about strange outfits and ice blocks and what should he do.

The reply took a long time. When it did come, it was short. **You're drunk.**

**What?** Mikai typed, this time wide-awake again, making an effort to type correctly. **I'm not! I swear! **

He waited, but there was no reply this time. And when he tried to call Darien's phone a full five minutes later, it went straight to the automated voicemail message.

Mikai pulled the phone away from his ear, staring at it. On the glowing screen he could see their text conversation, and he could see from the number of words his trembling fingers had messed up how he might have seemed drunk…but Darien should have trusted him.

"Shit," he said one last time, softly. Tiredly.

He leaned forward and turned off the lamp.


	2. Chapter 2

**A/N**: Gah, so great to hear from all you guys! Thanks for waiting so long! And for taking the poll – Ami won overwhelmingly.

Brief reference this chapter to Season 1's Chapter 29. Shout-out to Sue for sending me a sketch of Mikai and Ami right after I had finished this chapter (_months_ ago) even though she had no idea it existed. (Unless she did. She's kind of psychic that way.)

Last and most importantly, thank you to Jade. This chapter's for her. You guys have no idea what an angel she is. Please let her know how much we appreciate her in your reviews.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon.

**Date:** 9.23.11

**Warnings:** Rated M for Mikai. Just a little language, really.

C

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Two: Ami

C

" _– san!_ " She jerked up, eyes screwed shut and arms flying up to block the attack hurtling toward her.

Except silence stretched around her. And no attack hit.

Tentatively, she cracked an eyelid open. Between her fingers something was visible: a mecha anime poster. She lowered her arms the rest of the way, realizing that she wasn't on a Tokyo street with Sailor Pluto, as she had thought, but alone in a bedroom. A familiar bedroom.

Kentaro-san's bedroom.

Relief rushed through her, constricting her limbs and lungs like a tight , warm embrace. She nearly choked on it; it filled her and made her clumsy as she scrambled out of the bed that smelled of shampoo and motor oil. Her feet were bare, sinking into the deep carpet as she ran to the closed door. She burst through it and there he was, balanced on the arm of his couch, watching the television.

He heard her coming and turned to face her, sliding off the couch. His hands came up as though to catch her by the shoulders. She let him, smiling so widely up at him her cheek muscles hurt. Around the smile she tried to say, "Do you have it?"

But he was searching her face, saying, "You're up! How do you feel? Any pain? Are you hungry?"

She shook her head; none of that was important. "The talisman! Do you have it?"

He tilted his head. "The what?"

Her smile dimmed. "The Garnet Orb." She searched his eyes, feeling the first flickers of fear. "The talisman, Kentaro-san! It was in my hand–"

"How do you know my name?"

She could have shaken him for playing his Terran games with her when so much was at stake. "This is no time for joking, Kentaro-san! Serena's in danger!"

"Serena–? Who–"

Frustration filled her. It spilled through her fingertips and sent ice racing up and down his arms, encasing them from his elbows to his fingertips.

Kentaro-san recoiled. "You–"

"I was holding a metal-wrought heart with a red jewel inside it!" She nearly trembled at her own audacity – she had just frozen him! _She had just_ _frozen Kentaro-san!_ – but she didn't release her grip on his wrists. "Where did it go?"

" –just froze me!" he finished sputtering. "Who _are_ you?"

She stared up at him in frustration and panic so overwhelming they left her mute. And then she noticed something. Something that she should have seen as soon as she saw him.

His hair was dyed electric blue. Not the reddish-orange it had been the last time she saw him. And the third hole in his auricular cartilage, where he usually wore a titanium hoop, was closed-up, the nearly invisible dimple there indicating it had been closed for at least a year, if not longer.

Her gaze wandered past his face to the living room. There was a new afghan tossed carelessly over the back of his leather sofa, which looked more worn than she remembered, and the place of honor below the TV that had been occupied by _Naruto_ DVD boxsets the last time she saw it now held a series she did not recognize. Her gaze returned to his face, and noticed, as she had not before, faint, barely discernible new creases at the corners of his eyes and mouth.

"Oh."

Kentaro-san looked down at her hands, then back to her face. "What? What is it?"

"What…year is it?" she heard herself say faintly. Of course. Of _course_ she had not really escaped Pluto…

Kentaro-san lifted an ice-encased hand and pointed at a calendar on the wall. February _2011._

Four years had passed since Pluto pointed her staff at her and tried to freeze her in time.

_Tried?_ repeated a voice in her head. _Succeeded_. Pluto's attempt to freeze Sailor Mercury in time must have struck her just as Ami attempted to teleport them to Kentaro-san's apartment. The magics had then somehow mixed – literally freezing them – _her_, she thought dazedly – in time.

"Oh," she said again. She looked down at her fingers, flexing them, feeling the strange feeling of possession, of them being _her_ fingers. Responding to _her_ thoughts. She forced her arms to her sides and looked up at Kentaro-san. He was watching her with hooded, careful eyes, and she suddenly felt a relief so strong it nearly liquefied her patellar ligaments.

Because it was sheer, dumb, incredible _luck_ that she had ended up in Kentaro-san's apartment four years away from her own time. Every statistic dictated that she should have popped out of time into a time millions of years in the future, when the Earth was little more than space debris around their system's supernovaed sun, or thousands of years in the past, into some shallow warm sea in the Cambrian era. Landing in a time when Kentaro-san was still alive, much less still in the same apartment, out of the _billions_ of possible years she could have ended up in, was like landing on the head of a needle in a universe-sized haystack.

Struck a bit dumb by how close she had come to being stranded millions of years in the future or past, she could only swallow.

But after a moment, the nagging knowledge that she wasn't done yet, wasn't safe yet – that _no one_ was safe yet – wriggled through her. She forced her eyes up to Kentaro-san again. He still watched her closely, suspiciously – he didn't know her. Didn't recognize her. And it wasn't that he didn't recognize her because she wasn't Mercury. If that was the case, he wouldn't have asked who Serena was. Something else was at work here; something, or someone, had taken away his memory of her. Sailor Pluto? The High Senshi?

In four years, anything could have happened.

She searched his dark eyes, trying to find some hint of the Kentaro-san she had known, the one who had gotten Ami Mizuno a chess set for Christmas and threatened Mercury for her sake. There was a dull ache inside her along with the apprehension. This moment was supposed to have been different. She was supposed to have been able to say, "It's me, Kentaro-san! It's _me_!"

And he was supposed to have been proud of her.

She shook her head, shaking the thoughts away. She met his eyes again. "You're sure you don't recognize me at all?"

He studied her with the same intensity he could remember him training on Mercury when he was trying to figure out one of her plans. "Should I?"

Not answering, she touched a finger to his arms. The ice encasing them collapsed into liquid, sluicing down to the ground. Without conscious thought she waved her hand, freezing the falling water before it could splash into the carpet. She looked at her pale reflection in the pane of ice, thinking. Sailor Pluto could have taken the Shittenou's memories, but why? Pluto wanted the prince kept alive so that Serena wouldn't die when she fought Chaos, and the Shittenou were one of the prince's best – _only_, she heard herself think – lines of defense. Why would Pluto have removed their memories, rendering them incapable of protecting him? She still needed them, didn't she, because the flash-forms couldn't have surfaced yet; Pluto wouldn't have let them unless she had the Garnet Orb to wake Saturn, and she didn't have it. Mercury had taken it.

Her eyes moved up from her reflection, guided by some vague intuition to Kentaro-san's jeans pocket. An Orb-sized shape bulged there.

Relief made her eyelids flutter for a second. "Kentaro-san, do you remember Shields-san?"

"You mean Darien?" He shifted. "Yes. Uh, could you maybe look at my face when we talk?"

She lifted her eyes, peripherally puzzled by the slight dilation of his pupils as he met her gaze but mostly occupied with the fact that he remembered Darien but not Serena. Why? "Is he all right?"

Kentaro-san snorted. "As all right as a sociopath can be," he muttered under his breath, but he sounded more sad than angry. "Look, kid, enough of the one-sided interrogation." He took a step toward her. "Clearly there's something you expected me to know, and I don't know it." He took another step closer, gripping her shoulder. "What's going on? Who are you?"

She hadn't stepped back when he stepped forward, instead staring into the wall over his shoulder, trying to think of what Mercury would do in this situation. Her eyes went to her reflection in the now-blank TV screen. There were only her own dark eyes staring back in the reflection, not Mercury's icy ones…

A gasp escaped her. She spun, wings materializing at her bare feet, and a blink later she was in the icy cavern where Mercury had spent so many hours training Rei. Floating above one of the ice-rimed consoles, slowly revolving, was the Time Mirror that Mercury had stolen from the Time Plane.

Frost covered its surface. She lifted a hand to wipe the frost away, remembering as the movement let cold air draft about her bare legs that she was wearing little more than an over-large t-shirt. Despite herself, she blushed, looking at her reflection in the mirror to see just how indecent she looked – and saw Kentaro-san's reflection staring back at her over her shoulder.

She spun around, the movement jarring his hand from where it had been on her shoulder. Stupid, stupid, stupid! How could she not have noticed him holding onto her when she teleported?

Mercury would have noticed. Mercury would never have made such a mistake.

"What _is_ this? Your Fortress of Solitude?" Mikai was turning slowly on the spot, taking in every detail of the cavern.

Before she could answer, the mirror emitted a flash of light. She jerked back around to face it. Everything around her, even Kentaro-san, faded from her attention as images began to race across the glass.

She saw her own body disappearing, and an explosive power, so white and hot it burned away everything in the glass. Then it dimmed into Kentaro-san's face; he was holding a hand to his ear, looking shocked and frightened – then his image gave way to that of the little boy who had been so often with Serena and Shields-san at the arcade, except now aura pulsed from him and gold horns protruded from his hair…

On and on the onslaught of images went. Serena with the brown-haired girl-child, Shield-san with her…Sailor Lanai and two High Senshi hurtling throuh the sky…Uranus walking away from Neptune…a white-haired man with bloody fingers…Venus's blue eyes…Serena plunging a knife into a dark-haired man's back…Serena fighting the Wiseman….Serena watching memories float from her friends' mouths…

Serena leaving with the High Senshi.

On the image of the childishly drawn picture of Serena and the girl, the mirror froze. A spiderweb of cracks erupted at its center. Then, all at once, the mirror crumbled into a pile of glittering dust on the ground.

Standing there, she felt as though her insides had done the same thing. It looked like Serena had saved the timeline, but at what cost? She had left with the High Senshi to fight Chaos – and that had been _four years ago. _She could be dead now. She could have been dead for years already!

No. She tried to get herself under control. To stop the hyperventilation she could feel clutching at her lungs. Mercury wouldn't react like this. Mercury would think it throughly calmly. Reason it out.

Fact: Mercury had sensed when Serenity died, back in the Silver Millennium. There had been a torn, bloody space in her soul, an overpowering pain that nearly eclipsed her own death throes. It would valid to assume, then, that Ami would feel something similar if Serena was dead. But she did not. Conclusion: Serena wasn't dead. Yet.

Fact: Serena had taken Endymion, Jupiter, and the Shittenou's memories of her away when she left. If Mikai was any indication, they had also lost their memories of their powers and past selves as well, which made sense, considering they had all uncovered their powers as a result of meeting Serena – except, possibly, for Darien? He had been Tuxedo Mask as early as Serena's first transformation into Sailor Moon, possibly earlier. She filed away the possibility to think about later. What she did not know was if only the people who had been physically present with Serena and the High Senshi had lost their memories. Did the Outer Senshi and Rei remember still Serena? For Rei, the question was moot – Mercury had put airtight precautions in place to ensure that even she wouldn't be able to track down Rei and Hotaru. Conclusion: She might be the only one on the planet who remembered Serena.

Fact: She would never be able to save Serena on her own. Saving her meant fighting not just Chaos but the High Senshi who wanted to use her as cannon fodder as well.

_"Ami,"_ she had said that day, that horrible day when Ami was so exhausted and scared. _"Ami, you don't have to do this._" She had stretched her hand out; her glove had been so white before her blood splattered onto it.

Fact: Trying to save Serena almost certainly meant _dying_.

_ "I don't want you to worry about this ugliness anymore."_

Conclusion: She was going to try anyway.

She turned to Kentaro, touching two fingers to the back of his hand, and with a thought, she teleported them both back into his apartment. Then she was at the other end of the room, one hand on the front door and the other gripping the talisman she had slipped from his pocket.

"Thank you," she said, and could not keep a shy smile from her lips as she tilted her head, "Kentaro-san."

Then she disappeared.

C

"Wai – !"

But she was already gone. Mikai tore through the front door, thundering down the porch steps in his bare feet and looking left, right, left. But the street was empty in both directions, the twelve a.m. darkness broken only by the wan streetlights.

"Shit." His mind was spinning. For a minute, he put his hands out to catch himself in case as the world around him seemed to spin, too. All he could see was Darien's face as it had been in that mirror, smiling and sarcastic and _alive_ as he looked at the girl with the weird bunned hair. And the tortured look on the ice girl's face as she watched the pictures of the same girl, how she had whispered without seeming to hear herself, "_Serena_," and "We have to _find_ her…"

There was something else, a less-clear memory, nagging at Mikai's brain, too. He ran back up his front walk and the porch in two leaps and punched his keyboards to bring the two desktops idling in the dining room back to life. He brought up several internet browsers on the two computers he had idling on his desk. Darien and the others – that kid Motoki, he remembered vaguely, and that other kid who had followed Darien around all throughout high school, the artsy one; who would have seen either of them becoming superheroes, but then, he never in a million years would have believed someone who told him Darien would prance around in a tuxedo fighting crime – had been wearing their Infinity uniforms, which meant he was looking at something three years ago or earlier. He set his first filters searching, then, as he thought again of that blond boy whose name he couldn't remember, he remembered that he had been a diplomat's son – and he hit the source of the nagging feeling.

The black-haired girl. The one there had been a brief flash of in the mirror – she was the daughter of that senator who had died a few years back. Hino. He quickly googled it and almost immediately hit paydirt. Amid the numerous articles covering Hino's death, there was a link to a newspaper article titled, "Disappearance Linked to Senator's Missing Daughter?"

And it was purple, not blue. Meaning he had clicked on it before. Even though he had absolutely no memory of doing so.

He remembered the self he had seen in the mirror, the one with the fiery hair and brash grin and _freaking magical powers_, and felt a strange thrill, as though he had just seen a ghost reflected behind him in the mirror. _He _must have been the one to look at the article.

He didn't even have to scroll down in the article to find what he was looking for. Right beside the first paragraph of the story, the photo of a sad-eyed girl stared back at him. _Ami Mizuno_, read the caption, _was reported missing about the same time as Rei Hino according to Tokyo Police representative Kaidou Kasaburanka_.

_Ami Mizuno_. He rolled the syllables slowly on his tongue as he scanned the rest of the article, and then made a quick hacking excursion into new mainframes: Tokyo Electric's and Juuban Second General Hospital's. Then he leapt out of his chair, shoved his feet into a pair of loafers, and ran out the door again with keys in hand.

He found her not at her mother's apartment but at her hospital. She was perched on the edge of one of the plastic chairs in the ER waiting room, a too-large baseball hat pulled over her head to conceal her face. Where she had gotten it, or the pullover and jeans she was wearing, he didn't know, but he didn't know how – or when – she had managed to snag the talisman thing from his pocket, either.

From beneath the cap, she was watching the nurses' desk like a hungry orphan watching a family out to dinner, her gaze following each white-coated physician that moved to and fro behind the nurses' station. Her hands were knotted, white, in her lap.

His voice came out low. "Ami."

She gave a terrible start, like someone who had just felt a cold gun barrel pressed to their neck. Her huge-eyed gaze scrambled onto his like a frightened creature, all tiny clutching hands.

He hunkered down in front of her. She stared at him, and he put a hand around one of her ankles, feeling how she trembled through the tight denim.

He squeezed her ankle gently. "Will your magical Hermes-travel carry us to this Serena person?" he asked. "Or are we taking my car?"


	3. Chapter 3

**Author's Notes:** At long last…

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon.

**Date:** 10.3.11

**Warning:** Language.

C

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Three: Star Maker

C

"System shows irregular gamma emission from red star zero-niner-sigma. Evidence of space stretch evident along given orbit path, indicative of Chaos's new gravity-warpers. Sensors read black matter degradation at 70 percent with an hourly increase of 0.35 percent. If degradation continues at this rate, black hole mass will be reached within 20 hours."

A brief crackle of aura-static, like a tickle in her temporal lobe. "Maker, we read you. Relay the space stretch coordinates to Control and await further orders."

Sailor Star Maker packaged the sensor data scrolling across her mask-screen into a file and converted it to photon-format for control. She sensed more than saw the beam of data as it arced along the trail her aura had left to the Control ship three systems away. Aura-band beaming was a system of her own devising, and permitted long- and short-distance communication in systems that were too primitive to have established beam-band communication – such as this one, a system outside of Magellan that was so small its reptilian inhabitants were barely aware of life outside their planet, much less of how to construct intergalactic communication systems.

The beaming was, for the most part, only accessible to Senshi, who were the only ones with auras powerful enough to leave such a strong trail, but considering that Senshi were the ones undertaking missions most in need of such communication – rescue, reconnaissance, battle – that was hardly a shortcoming. Still, if Maker lived through this war – _if _it ever ended, Healer would have corrected caustically – she would like to see if there could be a way to expand its applications to non-Senshi. Such an invention might finally bring Kinmoku some good publicity, for once.

Maker shifted, adjusting the diameter of her aura-field, and brought up the sensor data on her mask-screen again. She had been sent to the system because the High Council's sensors had picked up Chaotic activity near its red star. Logic had said it was probably a fluke – there was nothing this tiny system had that any Chaos forces could possibly want. There were a few gas giants composed of halogenic gases too volatile for any practical use (although, Maker thought suddenly, keying a quick memo into her notes as she thought of it, there could be a fluoroscopy application) and a few satellites, none life-supporting, so Chaos could not even harvest any slave labor from them.

Now, however, having seen the system and run a few scans and calculations of her own, Maker understood exactly what interest Chaos had in this system. Somehow, the red star at the system's center was slowly turning into a black hole. Normally, this would not merit High Senshi concern, especially because this one was in an uninhabited system. But this uninhabited system's gravity wells were ancient, deep and tangled, traces of the more powerful star that red-zero-nine-sigma had once been, and, moreover, located at the center of a spiral galaxy. Its collapse into a black hole was over eighty percent likely to initiate a chain reaction of destruction, starting with the closest spiral arm –

Which was where Magellan was located. Magellan, the planet that housed the starship yard where four Council battleships were being built. Four precious, nearly-finished battleships that were sorely needed to punch through the chokehold Pharaoh 90's siege had put on Phi-Chi territory so that the twin planets could continue to ship weapons and soldiers to the Council fronts. If Magellan and its shipyard were sucked into this imminent black hole, the war might be as good as lost.

Static tickled Maker's senses. "Senshi Star Maker, you are to rendezvous with us. Control has sent orders for us to take you to Magellan."

"Acknowledged," Maker said, already following her aura trail back to the small reconnaissance shuttle. She climbing through the depressurized port, feeling the shudder of the shuttle accelerating into hyperspeed even as the port doors shut behind her and air began to hiss back into the port's bay, pressurizing it so that she could lower her aura-shield. Thanks to their ability to generate such a powerful aura field, Senshi were capable of moving through space, even hyperspace, without the temporary space suits non-Senshi required, but not indefinitely, and certainly not without a great deal of energy expenditure.

She shuddered tiredly despite herself as she tore open an aliment bar and began to chew it methodically, her eyes on the hyperspace blur visible through the viewport. Magellan was only a short distance away, close enough to reach by using the sublight engines. The fact that the shuttle was hyperjumping to reach it was proof of how urgently her services were needed to help evacuate the planet. She began to wolf a second bar down, then a third, even though the taste repulsed her, knowing she would need as much energy as possible to maintain her aura-field.

Some sleep would have helped as well, but there was no time. She gave herself a quick-acting stimulant instead, grinding the syringe to powder beneath her boot because the bay had no sharps container and she dared not spare the energy to simply incinerate it with a blast of power.

A low chime from the speaker was her only warning before the shuttle fell out of hyperspeed. Through the viewport Maker saw that they had dropped out just outside the shipyards, the four hulking battleship skeletons there looming up like huge planets themselves. Ships swarmed in the space all around them: ships rising from the surface, ships darting through the battleships' metal skeletons, ships disappearing with winking flashes as they burst into hyperspace, escaping the now-doomed planet.

News traveled fast, she thought, more grimly than wryly, but any further thoughts were cut off by a sudden weight crashing onto her mind.

It was as if the ship's inertial compensator had suddenly malfunctioned, making her feel twenty times heavier than she was. Her knees buckled, hitting the metal floor. This was no technological malfunction, though; she had felt this sort of thing once before, the time that she and the others had gone before the High Council. All those collected huge auras bearing down…

"Ship _Kinomoku_," came a voice over a hailing aura-channel, audible to Maker because her aura was still linked to the shuttle's communication frequency. "This is Sailor Moon. What's your condition?"

"We – we are undamaged and at sixty-five percent fuel, Your Highness." The captain's voice stumbled slightly, betraying his awe at being addressed by the legendary Moon Princess. "Senshi Maker is–"

"Coming," Maker finished shortly, and burst through the port before anything more could be said.

The Moon Princess's presence unsettled her. The girl had come burning into the public sphere like a meteorite, faster than one could trace and brighter than one could bear to look at. Since her formal introduction by the High Council four years ago, she had streaked from galaxy to galaxy, leaving behind afterimages of benevolence and god-like power. One could hardly turn on a holo-channel without encountering footage of Chaos fortresses she had laid waste to or crowds of bloodied, grateful refugees whose ships she had saved from Chaos attacks. Deliverer, the masses called her, Goddess, and Messiah. Maker did not know how much of it was propaganda created by the Council to make it look like the Senshi were winning the war and how much was genuine, but she knew that all meteorites, no matter how bright, eventually met a fiery end.

She had never been able to look at holos of the somber-looking princess without wondering how soon that end would come.

There was a gleam of bright hair visible in the same vicinity as the tremendous aura Maker sensed. She veered away from it, heading toward one of the other Senshi auras she felt. Darting beneath two speeding cargo ships, she came up on a Senshi she recognized as Sailor Lanai, the High Council warrior who stood beside the princess in every holo-cast. The older woman had her shoulder braced beneath the bottom one of the battleships' hulls, her face oil-streaked and eyes dark-circled, but she spoke briskly, as though they were just in the middle of a simulation.

"Senshi Maker. We've been ordered to transport these three ships to Proxima Cereus."

Maker examined her face closely, thinking that Lanai's brain must have suffered oxygen deprivation if she thought they would possibly be able to transport four satellite-sized ships, that quite obviously all still lacked their hyperspace-drives, ten light-years away. "Beg pardon, Senshi Lanai, but that is impossible."

Lanai tiredly nodded at her shoulder, which was still braced against the ship's dwarfing hull. "Senshi Phi said that by extending our aura-fields to envelop the ships we should be able to transport them through hyperspace with us."

"There is no way for one aura field to extend far enough to encompass even one of these behemoths."

"Not one aura field. Four." Lanai nodded toward the Princess's and other Senshi auras.

Maker looked toward them. "No. It is not possible for separate minds to synchronize the hyperspace jump to the deci-second that will be necessary to keep the ships from being shorn apart –"

"Which is why you will be opening your mind to a mind-meld," Lanai said shortly. "Take your position just aft of the starboard gunner's station, Maker, and get ready."

Stunned, but drilled since her earliest memory to follow orders, Maker flew to the indicated spot. Carefully, she braced her shoulder against a gigantic steel girder. She ground her teeth and forced herself to open her mind, stubbornly keeping her mind on mundane, impersonal thoughts by noting that this part of the ship's hull was almost finished, the expensive weaponry and gunner's stations already installed.

It was the last private thought she had. At that moment, three other minds rushed into hers. It was like being at the ocean shore, sitting on the sand right where the tide came up, and feeling sand and shells rush against her, spilling inside her fuku; she recoiled against it–

_Maker!_ came Lanai's sharp mind-voice. And something else, a gentler soothing, like cleaner water shielding her from the detritus…

But there was no time to focus on that, for then Lanai's voice was counting down, and Maker had to shove her aura out, out, out, and it felt terrible, like someone grabbing hold of her hair and yanking it as hard as they could, felt her eyes watering –

_One!_ and they surged forward into the mottled colors of hyperspace.

Nearly as quickly as it began, it was over. The cold blue light of Proxima Cereus's dwarf star washed over them, making the battleship's metal hull gleam icily.

But Maker was trembling as though from shimmer-stim withdrawal. Her hands shook, her mouth was slack. Hot mucus pooled in her mouth and nose. Lanai, a few meters away, was not in much better shape; she clung to the hull, retching, and her own sick would have floated into her face if not for the long-haired Senshi who flew up behind her and pulled her away. It was the Moon Princess.

She was very pale but did not look in anywhere near as bad a shape as them. "We can't do that again."

"We have to. Three more times," said a voice from behind Maker. She turned shakily to see Sailor Lethe wiping her green-tinged mouth. _The_ Sailor Lethe. What sort of celebrity team-up had she been pulled into?

"No," said the princess. Her eyes went to her side, and for the first time Maker realized that there was someone behind her, a male, dressed all in dark clothing stitched with tiny gems, who had been all but invisible against the starscape behind her. "Sapphire thinks he has a way to capture the black hole."

"No," Lanai said immediately. "We have our orders, we will follow them."

"Even if we move the battleships, the people of Magellan are still going to die!" said the princess. "If we can't stop the black hole, then we should at least be trying to evacuate them instead of wasting all our energy on these empty ships!"

"We have our orders," Lanai repeated. She sounded as if she were reciting a speech she had memorized. "If these ships are destroyed, we will lose the potential to save many more planets than just Magellan."

The princess's fists curled at her sides. "And if we find a way to stop black holes we'll be able to save many more planets than just saving the battleships would."

"As usual, you seem to be having a problem understanding how reality works, Princess," said Lethe silkily. "There _is_ no way to stop black holes, much as there is no way to bring back to life children _who never existed_."

Something dark lunged through the princess's colorless eyes. For a moment, the empty vacuum seemed to become substantial, heavy with coppery bloodlust. Maker's hands shook harder, dark spots traveling across her vision.

Then the weight disappeared.

So had the princess.

"Fool!" Lethe hissed. But before she had a chance to say anything more, the princess had reappeared, and with her, not one or two but all_ three_ of the other battleships.

"There," she panted, eyes poison-lit. Then she vanished again, this time with the man Sapphire.

Lethe glared at the ships floating silently in the starscape with a hatred that could only come of jealousy. It tinted her eyes dark like a bruise. "Galaxia will have her head for that."

Lanai released a sound like a sigh. "We have to go after her."

"We were told to report to Entinas when we were done transporting the ship," Lethe retorted.

"What about the evacuees?" Maker heard herself say.

Slowly, clearing saying something she did not agree with but had to say, Lanai said, "Magellan's importance is as a shipyard. With that objective taken care of, we must go to the next highest priority. Entinas is under attack by one of Chaos's ice demons."

Entinas was an agricultural planet whose crops fed a whole swathe of sectors, so Maker knew choosing it over Magellan was a tactical decision. She did not disagree with the soundness of the decision. It was just that…

"Damn it, Serena," said Lanai suddenly, with a harshly expelled breath, as though giving in to an unwelcome decision. She slammed her wings open.

"Don't – !" Lethe began sharply, but Lanai had already disappeared into hyperspace, streaking in the direction of Magellan instead of Entinas.

Lethe cast Maker a commanding look. Maker immediately obeyed it, diving into hyperspace in pursuit of Lanai –

Only to be slammed right back out of hyperspeed by a blinding white light.

As abruptly as it had become visible, the white light disappeared, revealing the red star, with none of the swirling in its gas giants that the black hole's gravitational pull had caused. Maker whipped out her sensors, scanning the vicinity, and saw that the pull of the gravitational well had disappeared. But there was a new energy source in the system…

"There," said Lanai sharply, and Maker looked up to see the princess and her male companion hovering near the third planet. Their hands were clasped, and the princess's eyes were glowing bright silver; the man's dark, dark blue. As Maker watched, the princess's wings began to droop, and the glow of her eyes began to fade.

Then they rolled back in her head, and she crumpled.


	4. Chapter 4

**A/N**: Thank you, as always, to Her Excellency, the Magnificent Jade. Thanks also to a friend (you know who you are) who prompted me to finish and post this chapter. I needed the push – sorry to everyone for the wait!

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon. Or that super-awesome "I need a hero" Tuxedo Mask shirt from Hot Topic. Or zip-lock bags.

**Date:** 11.11.11

**Warnings:** Language, situational references.

C

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Four: Motoki

C

"All right, Takegawa-san, that's the last of your motion exercises for the day." Motoki gave the elderly man a smile, tucking his gnarled hand back under the rumpled sheet. Takegawa didn't smile or acknowledge him, just kept staring at the ceiling, air whistling softly in and out of his pale lips. He had been like this for a few days now, and Motoki knew from experience that it meant that soon he would probably be summoned to Takegawa-san's room not to give him his daily arm and leg motion exercises but to clean the signs of death from his body before his family was brought in to see him. This was how it usually happened – the normally cheerful residents who joked with him when he came in to help them dress each morning would begin to be confused when he asked them to lift their right arm so he could help them put on their shirt sleeve, and then they would start to eat less and their eyes would unfocus when he talked to them; and sometimes they would bring themselves to with a "Hmm?" and sometimes they wouldn't even notice him the whole time he was there.

He was sad, because Takegawa had been one of the friendliest patients on his floor, always ready with a toothless smile. He had a way of looking up at Motoki from over his reading glasses just the same way that Toki's dad had always done, and to see him slowly drifting away like this was like watching his father's decline all over again.

"Furuhata."

Motoki looked toward the door, his back immediately straightening at the charge nurse's brusque tone. "Yes, Chiyo-san?"

"You have visitors."

Motoki cringed internally even as he placed the call light next to Takegawa-san's hand, in easy reach should he need it. The nursing aides weren't exactly forbidden to receive visitors during their shifts, but it certainly wasn't encouraged, and Chiyo-san was the strictest charge nurse in the facility. He couldn't afford the demerit; he was finally planning to go back to school this summer, and he needed the money for tuition, he couldn't lose this job –

"Apparently," said Chiyo, "it's urgent." Her flat tone let him know that she hadn't appreciated being told such a thing, and he cringed again, wishing that whoever these visitors were they could have refrained from offending his boss. It couldn't be his mom; she was courteous to a fault, and an hour away by train with Gramps besides. She wouldn't leave Gramps alone to come see Motoki. The more likely candidate was Unazuki; ticking off Motoki's boss sounded like something right up her alley…

"Ah. Okay. Thank you, Chiyo-san," said Motoki, and turned to Takegawa. "Please buzz me if you need anything, Takegawa-san."

He washed his hands quickly and followed Chiyo out into the hall. She strode toward the lobby where patients' families were received, so he assumed his visitors were there. He tried to glance surreptitiously down at his scrubs to make sure no stains were too visible – he hadn't emptied any bedpans or replaced any Chux pads yet today, but a few of his sets of his scrubs did have stains from that sort of thing, stains that wouldn't come out no matter how many times he had washed them, and even if Unazuki was his sister and he had taken this job for her, and for Mom and Gramps, there was a part of him, deep inside, that cringed away from letting her see him like this, smelling like shit and death and the no-tears baby shampoo they used to wash the elderly ladies' hair.

It cringed away from anyone seeing him like this, really. It was why he hadn't tried to stay in touch with his friends – Kobayashi with his radio job, Asanuma with his glitzy art, Darien with his prestigious American college. It was why he never quite got around to answering Kobayashi's "how you doing, man?" e-mails or ever returning the Bretaigne, Brussels, Prague postcards that arrived with Asanuma's carelessly scrawled "Living the life, man! Wish you were here!"

Sometimes Motoki finally slid into in his bed at night, aching at every joint from lifting and wheeling patients all day, so exhausted that there were bright lights behind his eyelids when he blinked but unable to fall asleep, chewed on by a sense of failure so sharp that he could only curl into his pillow and _breathe_. Slow, shaking breaths, because he had wanted to do so many things, learn so many things, and he had worked so hard, and…this. This was all he could do. Lift patients onto bedpans so they could shit in their beds and play "pedal to the metal" with their gnarled feet and comb thin, straggling hair over and over for patients who were so lonely that they pretended to dislike how their hair or clothes looked each day so that Motoki would stay longer with them to fix it. Who were so lonely that he couldn't hate them. Couldn't hate any of them.

Only himself.

There were only two people in the lobby. A muscled guy with dyed-blue hair, pierced and bandannaed within an inch of his life, lounging on one of the flower-patterned sofas with his arms and legs spread wide, hands drumming the armrest and backrest, and a young girl who couldn't have been more than sixteen, perched on the edge of the same sofa, leaning slightly away from the man. They both met Motoki's eyes as he came in, and deep unease filtered into him. He looked around, trying to find some sign of someone else, anyone else, in the lobby, but there was only Chiyo-san beadily watching him, then the pair, them him again. He could tell from her expression that she was eyeing the girl's mussed sweater and pleading expression and wondering if she needed to call children's protective services, and honestly, Motoki was, too, but they were getting up now and coming toward him, and God why did this sort of thing have to happen to him - ?

"Motoki!" The guy was pushing to his feet, striding forward. "How've you been?"

He gripped Motoki's hand, shaking it firmly, as Motoki regarded him blankly. "I…know you?"

If Motoki didn't know better he would have said the man's face fell, as if he was disappointed by this response. "Kentaro Mikai. One of Darien's friends. We met a few times, you know, when you and Ittou came to see him off at the airport?"

Oh. Motoki was remembering better now. "You had…less piercings then."

Kentaro laughed, raking a hand through his hair. "Yeah, well. I've been kind of bored, these past few years." He looked back at Motoki, watching his eyes flick to the girl who had come slowly up behind him and looked like she was half hiding behind Kentaro but gazing intently at Motoki with a fascination not unlike that of the little kids Motoki had held in his lap when he played Santa Claus at their high school Christmas carnivals: half disbelieving and half hopeful. When she realized Motoki was staring back at her, though, she hastily averted her eyes, looking determinedly at Kentaro instead. "Same for you?"

Motoki returned his gaze to Kentaro. He was increasingly unnerved; was this girl in some kind of trouble? She hardly seemed the type to get mixed up in a bad crowd, not that Kentaro had necessarily been part of a bad crowd when Motoki had met him. But he recognized her type from his years working the arcade: shy girls who hovered at the fringes of popular groups, sitting shyly in corners and shadows.

"I…do I know _you_?" he said, speaking directly to the girl.

Kentaro licked his lips. Glanced behind Motoki. "Actually," he said, "could we talk to you in private?"

Motoki knew, without looking, that Chiyo-san's eyes were glaring holes into the back of his head. "I really don't have time," he began helplessly, half glad for Chiyo's presence so that he had an excuse not to deal with these two.

Kentaro and the girl exchanged a set of meaningful glances that had Motoki suddenly re-evaluating the girl's age. She spoke for the first time, her voice low and clear.

"We can wait."

Motoki swallowed a sigh, eyeing her with even more distrust than he had eyed Kentaro at first. "Okay. My lunch break is at twelve. It's only half an hour, though."

The girl smiled, slightly. "That should suffice."

C

His lunch hour always began with a trip to his locker to unstrap his back brace and grab his sandwich and chips. Motoki sighed as he peeled apart the velcro belt, gingerly rubbing his side and reaching for the bottle of aspirin in the back of his locker.

"Little young to be needing lumbar support, aren't you?"

Motoki jerked around. Kentaro was behind him, leaning against the employee lunch table.

He edged against his locker, surreptitiously patting his back pocket to check that his wallet was still there, and shrugged. The motion aggravated his muscles. He was the only male aide on the floor today, so the other aides had recruited his help in transferring their heavier patients to wheelchairs for their outdoors walks, and while he didn't mind helping, it was beginning to take a toll.

He shrugged. "Just a precaution."

"Has anyone ever told you that you have slight scoliosis?" The girl was suddenly there, too, right beside him, staring fixedly at his back. "All that lifting could aggravate it."

Motoki swallowed once, twice, as though it would return his heart rate to normal. "I'm sorry," he said, as politely as he could, "but what are you doing here?"

The girl took a step back. She looked apologetic now, not analytical, or predatory, as she had before. Her hands were clasped in front of her, and he wondered again how old she was. "We…" But she hesitated there, and though she opened, then closed, her mouth several times, she seemed unable to figure out what to say.

Kentaro gave a slight sigh, a rueful twist of his lips, and came forward, putting a hand atop the girl's head. She let out a long breath, squared her shoulders, and ducked her head from under his hand.

"You don't remember me?" she asked Motoki firmly, fixing her dark eyes on his.

Motoki had a brief moment of panic. One always heard those stories about your past coming back to bite you, but he hadn't even enjoyed so much as a kiss since he started working here, and before that he'd always used protection – and he certainly hadn't done it with a girl who looked barely old enough to be in high school. So he thought it safe to venture, "No…? Sorry."

She looked like she was bracing herself against disappointment, biting her lip. "He might not have…anyway," she said lowly, and Motoki wasn't sure if he or Kentaro were meant to hear it, but then she was looking up at him again. "And you only remember Kentaro from the airport? Not anything else?"

Motoki racked his brain, casting a glance at the clock as he did so – 12:13, he had seventeen more minutes for his break. He hoped they'd leave soon. "No. I didn't even know he had friends other than me and Asanuma until we saw Kentaro-san at the airport." He nodded apologetically at Kentaro. "Sorry."

"No apology necessary." Kentaro waved it off, his lips twisted in a sardonic sort of smile. "I know what Darien was like. We were hardly a big happy family of friends that gathered for birthdays and New Year's, were we?"

There was a near bitter tone to his voice. Motoki had long since gotten over that bitterness, though, or had told himself he had. "Look," he said again, "why are you here?"

The girl got a simultaneously pained and determined look on her face. Then she poured out a story about ancient royalty and evil aliens and Senshi and Shittenou who were reincarnated into the present – one of whom, she said, was him, only he didn't remember because his memories, like Kentaro's, Asanuma's, and Darien's, had been taken. And they needed Motoki to come with them to help them convince Darien this story was the truth, and to go after the princess with whom he was supposedly in love.

Motoki listened patiently and with increasing sympathy as she finished her story. He had gotten sadly accustomed to scenarios like this through his patients – there was no shortage of Alzheimer's and dementia patients in the home. And they were earnest, just like this girl was, believing just as sincerely as she clearly did that what they were telling Motoki as he fed them their breakfast or carefully checked their physician-ordered restraints was the truth.

But right below the sympathy was anger. Raging, boiling anger for Kentaro-san, who – if the seeking glances the girl shot him as she spoke and the encouraging nods he made in response were any indication – had apparently humored her in these delusions instead of getting her the medical help she needed. His first instinct had been the right one: Kentaro was a seedy bastard, was using this poor girl, and for some reason, he'd brought her to Motoki. If he had come expecting Motoki's help in the deception, he had another think coming.

Motoki kept all of this off his face, though, instead keeping his expression open and understanding as he looked at the girl. "I see," he said in the same calm, respectful tone he used with his patients. "That's a very interesting story, miss."

Her face fell. The look she gave him was the same one his Alzheimer's patients did when they realized he was humoring them: part dismayed, part betrayed.

"Furuhata-san, I promise it's the truth," she began, sounding as if she was trying to keep her voice calm herself, but Kentaro was palming her shoulder gently, moving around her. He held a hand out to Motoki.

Motoki looked down at it askance, wondering if the jerk expected him to _hold_ it, but then Kentaro's fingers closed into a fist, and craggy brown rock squeezed out from between them like play-dough crushed in his fist, began to spread up to engulf his hand, his wrist, his arm – then, rapidly, his whole body.

Motoki let out a strangled sound. But as quickly as the rock had enveloped Kentaro it disappeared, and Kentaro was standing there in a set of clothing completely different from the brown leather jacket and oil-smudged jeans he had been wearing before. It was something like armor, with plates that looked like they were made of the same craggy brown rock and boots and leather guards, and…and…

"See?" said Kentaro to the girl. "Told you we should've started with the demonstration." He looked at Motoki. "I'm a Shittenou. You're a Shittenou. Do you believe us now?"

Motoki wasn't quite capable of speech. Instead, he found himself looking dumbly down at his hand. It was rough, bits of peeling white skin from all the times he'd washed his hands today, and his thumbnail was mottled purple from when it had gotten jammed in Edo-san's wheelchair brake the day before. He closed it into a fist.

Nothing happened.

Before he could feel a sick swoop of disappointment or a grateful stab of relief, Kentaro's hand closed over his. And he felt it.

A little strange, like a static shock – more surprising than unpleasant. And then he felt a little straighter, a little taller, and the fist he was still looking at was wrapped in something like boxing tape, with heavy gold guards covering his knuckles.

Kentaro released his hand. Motoki looked at the rest of himself, now wearing a beige and green outfit impossibly similar to Kentaro's. And he shivered. He could see the Motoki the girl had described in his head, the one who was a Shittenou and had fought for a prince and been buried by the loss of his memories, and he felt like he was wearing a dead man's clothes, like they had dug up that Motoki's coffin and stripped the corpse of its armor and given it to Motoki to wear.

Kentaro looked excited, but the girl looked slightly ill. She watched Motoki with dark, sad eyes, as though she knew exactly what he was thinking.

"We should leave," she said, but Motoki said, involuntarily, "No."

She looked at him, and how could an expression hold both dread and hope?

"We need you, man," Kentaro was saying lowly. "Darien never really listened to anyone but you, you know that."

Motoki almost laughed. Not just at the idea that Darien Shields had _ever_ cared about a thing Motoki thought, or said, but at the idea that…that…

That he had grown so desperately unhappy with his life that he was dreaming up stuff like this, now, to escape it.

There was a sudden, stinging pain on his ear, yanking a yelp from him that seemed to make reality crash down around him again – except reality still included Kentaro in armor before him, and chain mail cold and heavy beneath Motoki's shirt. He reached up to his ear, the shell of which Kentaro had just pinched, hard, between metal-tipped fingertips.

"See?" said the other man. "Not a dream. Now, come on. We're busting this depressing joint."

"Kentaro-san," the girl said quietly.

But Kentaro didn't look at her. Gripped Motoki's arm tighter. "I saw it, Motoki. We were happy. That big happy family of friends I was making fun of? We had that. _We had that_. With Darien."

Motoki pulled away. "I… Look. Maybe you're right." He rubbed his eyes, felt the rough fabric of bandages covering his fingers. "Maybe that story is true. But I… I can't just take off even if I believe you. I have a family. They need me. They need the money I make here."

Kentaro didn't break eye contact with Motoki. He reached into some pocket on his belt and pulled out a rock, closing his fist around it. When he opened it, it was a crystal the size of a strawberry, glittering in the fluorescent light. He held it out to Motoki. When Motoki tried to step back, he took Motoki's hand, firmly, and pressed the crystal into it, closing Motoki's fingers around it. Then he reached into what looked like thin air and pulled out a checkbook.

Motoki looked at the crystal he was beginning to think was a diamond or something equally valuable, not sure what to do. "I don't…" He was uncomfortable, confused, and a little angry. "Kentaro-san, look –"

"Take that to a pawn shop or a jeweler or something," Mikai interrupted. "Make sure it's the real deal and that I'm not just pulling your leg. Then take this – " He ripped the check out of the book and handed it to Motoki, "to your bank and deposit it. Ask the teller to make sure it doesn't bounce. If it doesn't, and you're interested in working with us, there's fifty thousand more where that came from. We'll be back in two days for your answer."

C

Kentaro-san handed Ami a key card as he came back from the concierge's desk and slipped the other one into his pocket. "Fourth floor," he said as they headed for the elevator, and then, as though reading her mind, "Don't worry, I got two rooms. I'm not going to make you share a bed with me."

Ami wanted to collapse into water and sink into the floor, but there was other people in the elevator, so she couldn't. Instead, she just took out her Mercury computer and studiously absorbed herself in its screen, hoping that her longer hair would hide the flush she could feel burning on her neck. One good thing had come of jumping forward into the future: everyone had palm-size phones and computers, making the Mercury computer much less conspicuous to use. She wished she could have summoned her visor, though; it would have been another thing to hide her face from Kentaro-san.

Mikai, for his part, was paying more attention to the unreadable symbols scrolling across her tiny computer screen than to the pink tips of her ears – although, being an excellent multi-tasker, he noted those, too. He was curious about the Senshi side of this quiet girl, the diamond-hard side that surfaced when she was studying her alien computer and when they had argued, the previous day, over whether to find Motoki and Asanuma.

He had driven them from her mother's hospital to a twenty-four diner, and there the story of all that he had seen in that strange magic mirror came out of Ami in tense fits and starts – chunks of facts following slurries of hesitation and evasion as Mikai gently prodded the truth about Darien, and the girl Serena, and the rest of them, out of her. He had found himself thinking of the way he sometimes had to help his friends throw up when they drank too much, sticking his finger down their throat over and over again until the worst of the booze came out.

Not that what Ami had told him was as unpleasant as booze, per se – it was princes and princesses and magical warriors, all the sorts of things that had his inner otaku practically clawing up the walls with excitement – but there had been a sick, wan cast to her face as she told it, like it burned like acid coming up as much as any alcohol could have.

Plus, she had kept glancing at the diner doors as though planning to escape the instant he looked away.

He'd put his hand flat on tops of hers where it was clenched on the table next to her untouched plate of waffles. She hadn't even _buttered_ them yet, for God's sake, and at that point they'd been there over an hour. "Look. Ami. You can stop planning how to ditch me, okay? I'm coming with you."

Her hand had grown steadily colder under his, and Mikai'd had the strangest feeling that she was doing it deliberately, so that he would take his hand away. "You don't understand, Kentaro-san. I don't even know where I'm going. Even if I can find where Serena is – "

"She'll still die without Darien," he had finished. The prophecy had been one of the things she had tried to tiptoe around, emphasis on _tried_. "There's an easy solution to that, Ami."

He hadn't missed the way her eyes flicked furtively to his. They had done so every time he'd said her name, as if it startled her. It reminded him unpleasantly of his mom, of how she'd flinch sometimes when his dad called her, and he didn't like it one bit. He had resolved to _keep_ saying her name, gently, until she didn't react that way every time.

Ami had pulled her frigid hand from under his. "Serena didn't want him to come after her. She didn't want him to have to fight." Then, more quietly: "She didn't want any of us to have to fight."

Mikai had pursed his lips. "And that's very idealistic and well-meaning of her. But she doesn't get to make that decision for him."

"Why, because you think that's _your_ prerogative?" Ami's voice had risen so abruptly that the waitress and lone customer up at the counter had looked up with raised eyebrows. Even Ami herself had looked surprised, wide-eyed and pale. Mikai, however, had found himself grinning, pleased by this outburst for reasons he couldn't quite articulate.

This had only made Ami frown harder. "You don't know what it's like," she'd fumbled, frustrated by the way he was grinning at her, as though she was some amusing child, "to have to – to have to fight – Serena doesn't want us to have to go through that!"

Mikai had stopped grinning. "Funny," he said quietly, watching her. "I was under the impression going off to fight for her was exactly what you were planning to do."

Ami had glared at him. There was nothing endearing about it, the way it had been before when she glowered up at him from beneath her over-large baseball cap. This was icy, this was an alien warrior looking at someone whose throat she saw no reason not to slit.

"It's different," she said lowly. "I _owe_ her."

Mikai cocked a brow, like he wasn't half unnerved and half turned on. "So this is just a payback thing?" He leaned back in the booth, putting his feet up on the bench next to her. "She saved you, you'll save her, and then you'll be even steven and not need to have anything else to do with each other?"

She didn't say anything. It was answer enough for him. After a moment, he set down his two-creams-and-three-sugars coffee and let his feet fall from the bench to the floor. He took his phone out of his pocket.

"Let's break this down into steps, shall we? We need Darien, yes?" He glanced up only briefly, saw her biting her lip, back to uncertain Ami again. "Yes. But there's no way even in frozen hell that you and me are going to be able to convince him that all this – " He gestured vaguely at the air between them as if the story she had told him about Senshi and Shittenou was still floating in the air between them, "is true, on our own. We need reinforcements."

Ami straightened. "No."

"Darien listens to them," Mikai reminded her, not bothering to ask how well she knew the other two men. "Kind of." He tried not to think of how Darien had ignored his texts, turned off his phone. "More than he would to me, anyway."

"She wouldn't want it," Ami had said softly again. But she hadn't tried to stop Mikai as he scrolled down his contacts list to find Furuhata Motoki's old number.

Now, as the elevator let them off on the fourth floor, Kentaro-san went straight into his room, slinging his bag onto the floor. Instead of going to her own, adjacent room, Ami followed him in, hanging back as he flopped onto the bed, sighing. He popped an eye open then and peered at her, eyebrow raised. She could _feel_ the dirty joke coming, but he seemed to push his lips around it, reabsorbing it, and arranged his features to look attentive. "Did you need something, Ami-san?"

She stood awkwardly in the center of the room, unconsciously clenching the hem of her sweater in her fists. "Thank you," she managed finally. "For spending the money to – come here, and for – for Furuhata-san." She didn't know how much he had written the first check for, but if he was offering another fifty thousand as incentive it had to have been a lot.

Kentaro flashed a smile. "You're welcome. But I didn't do it for you, if that makes you feel better," he said. "It's for Dare."

Ami relaxed slightly, hands stopping their death-wringing of her sweater. But there was still a wistful ache inside her, wondering if anyone would ever value her that much. The way Kentaro-san did Darien, the way Lita had Serena. It was Rei who came to Ami's mind, Rei with her fierce, flashing eyes, Rei, who had asked Mercury what she had done with Ami, as though she cared. At least a little bit. Did Rei ever think of her now, wherever she was?

It didn't matter, not really. What mattered was that she was hidden, and safe, with Saturn's reincarnation. Ami told herself this and straightened her spine, meeting Mikai's eyes again.

"I don't think what we're doing to Motoki-san is right."

Kentaro-san's gentle smile faltered. Ami didn't wait for him to argue with her, just continued, quickly, "We're taking advantage of the wretchedness of his current situation. If he comes with us now, it will only be because his life is so dismal. If it wasn't, and you weren't paying him, he would never come."

Kentaro's posture didn't change but it somehow, suddenly, became grim. "That's the point, Ami. What else is he supposed to compare what we're offering him to? This _is_ his life."

"But it's not what it was _supposed_ to be," Ami said. "You saw, in the mirror – he's supposed to be at the arcade, happy – "

"With Darien, and Asanuma, and those girls, yeah," said Kentaro-san, and he was standing up now, gently cupping her elbow. "But not without them. Ami, the only way for him to regain his life as it's _supposed to be_ – " He crooked his other hand into mock quotation marks, "is to come with us and find them."

Ami stared at her other hand. "It just doesn't seem…right, that he should only come because his current life is unhappy."

"For what other reason did you expect him to come?" Kentaro-san's voice was less gentle now. When she darted a glance up at him he was frowning at her like a teacher at a student who was disappointing him. "You know we don't have any memories of our…_old_ lives. Yet you seem to be expecting that we should somehow still remember our feelings and obligations from that time and be drawn back to them. Motoki has no reason to feel a pull to…_this_ Darien. This Darien never saved his life. This Darien never stayed in touch with him after high school, never did anything that would make Motoki feel like he owed it to him to drop everything to come help him out."

He released her, but not without a gentle squeeze to soften his words. "Be realistic, Ami."

Ami's insides were tight. But she managed some mumble of unintelligible comprehension and made her way to the room's door. She seemed almost able still to feel Kentaro-san's big warm hand around her elbow, and when her hand was on the worn knob, she hesitated. Turned back, uncertainly met his watching eyes.

_Why did _you _come?_ teetered on her tongue. But she swallowed it, like he had swallowed his comment before, and mumbled a good night before letting herself out.

C

They went back at the end of Motoki's shift two days later. He met them in the back parking lot, by the dumpsters. He had the diamond in a plastic zip-lock bag, and under his hazel eyes were dark, non-plastic bags.

"Look," he began, "this – this stuff you're talking about…tracking down Darien and stuff…it's nothing illegal?"

Ami noticed that he looked at her as he talked, as though he trusted her more than he did Kentaro-san.

"No," she said. "But – it _is_ dangerous, Furuhata-san." She didn't look at Kentaro-san. "Chaos might have things guarding him. Waiting for us."

Motoki nodded, gravely, then turned to Kentaro. He held up the bag, slightly, awkwardly. "You said…"

Kentaro-san stepped forward. He had treated several dozen rocks the night before under Ami's directions in how to make the most valuable types of gems with the least flaws in their matrices. He'd written a check, too, for twice the amount he had promised Motoki two days before. He put it all into Motoki's little sandwich bag, and Motoki swallowed, eyes gleaming with simultaneous relief and sadness.

He pushed the bag deep into his scrubs pocket. "Let me take this home," he said, "and tell my charge nurse I'm leaving. Where do you want me to meet you?"

C

It was clichéd, and it was selfish, and cowardly, but it was the only way Motoki could bear to leave his family. What was left of it. He looked again at the note sitting on his desk – _goodbye, Mom, don't worry about me, I'll come back, I just need – _and then eraser smudges obscuring something that had been crossed out, and just, _I love you_ – weighted down by the bag of diamonds and rubies.

There was a picture of her and him and Unazuki and Dad on the desk, right near the letter, and the battered frame it was in had once held a different photo that was now lying in his desk drawer. It was one of him and Darien and Asanuma. He couldn't remember when it had been taken; they were standing in front of a school bus, and he looked like he might have been a junior in it, all freckled from the summer they'd spent at the beach. There was an empty space between him and Darien, big enough for someone to have stood in, almost as if there could have been someone there, someone who'd vanished, someone that, if they were there, Darien looks like he might have been leaning toward that someone, muttering a sarcastic joke in their ear. And if that's true, maybe that different Darien, the prince one who loved a princess that Kentaro and the girl were talking about, did exist.

Motoki looked at the shy, sparkling grin on his own face, tracing the spots on it where lines now creased his eyes, his mouth. Maybe…maybe that meant a different Motoki had existed as well.

Could still exist.

He slipped the photo into his duffel bag and left the apartment.


	5. Chapter 5

**A/N**: Wow, how many months has it been? Thank you so much to everyone for waiting! And big thank you to Jade for everything she does. Daydreamishly, we eagerly await our health-free trail mix.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon. Or kryptonium.

**Date:** 3.1.12

**Warnings:** None.

C

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Five: Lanai

C

_**Four Years Ago:**_

Ideally, Lanai would have been able to keep ninety percent of her attention on Serena. Most Senshi, regardless of their power level, were given a period equivalent to several of Terra's months to learn how to form and control a personal aura-field.

A sudden ambush by Chaos minions on a Lotanyan moon put a kink in those plans. Lanai extended her own aura-field to envelope Serena as their ship was shredded to sparking metal bits behind them by a flock of razor-clawed acidocks. The ship's oxygen stores were released in a white cloud into the black starscape around them like it was exhaling its dying breath.

There was no way Lanai would be able to keep her own aura-field around Serena all the way to the Council's rendezvous point; it drained too much energy. Instead, as Lethe and Mnemosyne took care of the acidocks, Lanai showed the girl instead how to stretch her aura around her to make a sort of space suit that would protect her from the vacuum of space that would suffocate and rupture her every cell otherwise.

Serena's light eyes following Lanai's demonstration of this magic was the first response she had made to any of the Senshi since she woke from the sleep-powder Lanai had used on her. She still did not speak, though, just performed the magic with as much ease as if she had been using it for decades already. Perhaps Lanai should have been pleased by this. She was not. As Serena performed the magic, her hair shifted shades: silver to white to yellow to white again. The moon on her forehead shimmered in and out of existence in time with the lavender and blue struggling in her eyes, which were blank, unfocused, as though staring inward at some internal battlefield.

Serena and Serenity were fighting, and Lanai didn't know who was winning.

And she couldn't train all of her attention on the girl to try to figure out who, and who she _wanted_ to win, because the aura of Chaos creatures was pulsing in the blurring hyperspace all around them, in every system they sped through. Her senses swept to and fro just as Lethe's and Mnemosyne's were doing before and behind her, keen for any sign of another Chaos ambush like the one that had decimated their ship. Her muscles trembled with anxiety, fatigue—and anger.

"What in the hells were you thinking?" she shouted finally, suddenly, when the trembling shook the words out of her mouth. Her voice echoed in the never-ending of the hyperspace tunnel. "Taking us through Chaos-infested space! You proud _fool_!"

Lethe looked scared, then angry. "It was not infested when we came here! It was one of the few–the few–"

"–the few space lanes that were not infested," finished Mnemosyne softly. Her sad eyes swirled with fear as Serena's did with Serenity.

"Not that you know anything," Lethe said, fierce, poisonous. "Cloistered on your precious blue planet! Safe, cozy, _ignorant_ to the holocaust around you –"

Lanai closed her eyes, feeling the truth of Lethe's words like a stake through her chest. She _had_ grown sheltered and soft on Endymion's planet. Fifteen years were a blink of an eye compared to how long she had lived, and yet it had been long enough to make her forget the horrors that had driven her to accept her assignment on Terra in the first place – even if she hadn't admitted to herself that that was why she was doing it.

"There!" said Lethe suddenly.

They snapped into formation around Serena as black shapes swooped into the tunnel, onto them. A savage swipe of her brush painted blades onto Lanai's wing feathers. She swept them out, feeling the resistance as they tore through the flesh of dozens of creatures. On the ship she had inked a sword along her inner right arm, a whip down her left; she yanked them from under her skin now and lashed out against the black, feathery bodies that pressed and thrashed around them. _Crows_, she thought grimly, the memory of Serena's Sailor Mars touching her thoughts before pain arced down her side and she returned her full attention to fighting.

On either side of her she could hear Lethe's roars as she hacked into the onslaught and Mnemosyne's muffled gasps. Behind her, within the triangle of their backs, there was a sluggish movement of aura and another one struggling with it, and damn it, Lanai should have tried to influence the fight between them while she could—

"Lan—!" Lethe's shout broke off into a wretched, choking sound, and Lanai parted her clenched jaw to shout back, "Lethe?" But sharp, sleek beaks and feathers thrust themselves inside her opened mouth, and her eyes flew wide in horror. Too late, she remembered, slamming both her eyelids and her jaw down. Delicate bones crunched inside her mouth. Choking, eyes streaming, she tried to close her wings around her, to protect herself for a few seconds so she could force the crunched, bleeding crow heads from her mouth, swipe the moisture from her bleeding eyes, but the crows only tangled themselves up in her wings, letting her own muscles push them in closer to her head, and somewhere in the cacophony she heard throaty, echoing laughter.

"Sailor Lead Crow will have your Star See–_argh_!"

Her voice broke off into a shriek. Abruptly, the crows around them burst into feathers. They drifted in a cloud around the Senshi almost more chaotic than the living creatures had been, though slower. Then there was a flare of energy from a few meters away, and the feathers were sucked backward, and gone.

Lanai looked up, vision blurry, and met Darien Shields's dark eyes. Then he vanished, as quickly as he had appeared.

Lanai barely had time for a flash of relief that she wouldn't have to fight him, for Lethe, not as paralyzed by his appearance as Lanai, swung her staff with the same force she had used against the ravening crows. The metal staff glowed eerily, like ghostlight underwater.

Darien tumbled back into sight, looking dazed. Dark, blue-black blood trickled out from under his dark hair from the staff's blow. It didn't turn to bubbles in the air in the vacuum, as it should have. Squinting, Lanai saw that he had shaped his aura into a bubble of void-space that protected him from the cold and airlessness of space like the Senshi's aura-shields. But Lethe's attack had startled him – doubtless he hadn't expected anyone to be able to reach into his void – and made his magic falter: she saw the blood vessels in his eyes pop, turning them red, before he managed to throw his void-shield up again. He looked up at them, through his hair, and Lanai's inside simultaneously sank and unclenched.

Because he wasn't Darien, or even Endymion. He was the Nemisian who had been with Diamond, the one who had protected Venus's reincarnation and disappeared when the Wiseman killed the Nemisian prince. He was Prince Sapphire.

Lethe's eyes narrowed. "I thought I sensed a _louse_," she spat. "He has been following us since Terra." She jerked her head toward Serena, who floated beside Lanai, pale and out of it and looking as if a crow's feather could knock her over. "Following _her_."

There was a faint spike of…_something_ in Serena's aura, and Lanai looked over to see the girl's eyes slowly focusing on the man. She felt a pang as she wondered if Serena would mistake him for Darien, as she had.

"You…" Serena said quietly, almost wonderingly; and her hair was shimmering back to blonde again as she locked gazes with him.

Lanai stepped between them. The man looked away, his eyes as dark as the blood trickling down his forehead, and flat, lightless. It was no wonder that she had mistaken him for Darien: they had the same blank, pale mask of a face and dark, intent eyes. Their intensity was focused on Lanai now, though she felt as if he were only staring through her to Serena, and Lanai wondered if this princes had somehow inherited his brother's obsession with the Moon Princess.

There was a shift in his aura, and she moved immediately to counter it, but as she heard his voice, realized it was only an extension of his void-shield to be able to speak with them without the vacuum swallowing the sound. He looked at her with knowing eyes, as though he knew that she expected him to attack. Yet he spoke almost stumblingly. "I mean no harm. I only—"

Energy drilled out of Lethe's weapon, toward the man. Lanai closed her eyes, reaching for Serena to cover her eyes.

But Serena wasn't there. And Lanai knew, somehow, even before she opened her eyes, where the girl had gone.

Sure enough, there was a burst of gray energy, not the subtle blue that should have accompanied Lethe's attack impacting the Nemisian's body. The gray died quickly in the vacuum, and behind it was the princess, floating in front of the Nemisian. The remnants of Lethe's attack were dwindling into sparks on her open, burned palms. "You can't kill him!"

"Watch me." Lethe aimed again, and would have shot once more had Mnemosyne not seized her arm.

"Senshi Lethe! You are _not_ to endanger the princess," Lanai snapped, voice so strained it nearly cracked. Technically she had no real power over Lethe, as Lethe and Mnemosyne were the ones who had been sent to regulate Lanai, but she had centuries of seniority on them, and the more she _acted_ like alpha female, the more likely Lethe was to submit to her. Still, she was walking a fine line, and she was acutely aware of it as she turned to speak to Serena in a lower, pained voice, trying to make her see reason. "Serena. He worked with the Wiseman. Working with a Chaos minion is punishable by death. As a High Senshi, Sailor Lethe is duty-bound to execute him."

Serena's face was paler than ever; Lanai could see the drain that absorbing Lethe's attack had caused her. She had only known her full power for a short time, and she was probably fighting Serenity for it. Blood dripped from her hands, simmering to bubbles as it escaped the aura of her shield.

"You can't kill him," she repeated.

Lethe looked at her in disgust, then to Lanai, as though to tell her to get her charge under control or Lethe would do it for her.

Lanai bent closer, lowering her voice to an almost pleading volume. "Serena." She was realizing afresh just how idealistic the girl who had been Sailor Moon was, and just how difficult it was going to be for her to see how the Senshi worked – how they _had _to work – and how much more difficult it was going to be for her to become part of that system. "Please understand. We _must_."

Serena met her eyes. "I swore to his brother I'd protect him," she said. "While I was in the Silver Millennium. Diamond made me swear I'd protect his brother if he helped me."

Lanai's mind snagged on the wording. "Swear" sounded strange coming out of Serena's mouth; she was much more a "promise" type of person. Swear was the sort of thing Darien would say. Why had she…

Then it hit her. She seized Serena's arms. "What did you swear? An oath_?_"

Above their dark circles Serena's eyes – they were blue again, a far-off part of Lanai's mind noted – looked startled. "I – "

Lanai's hands tightened. "A _blood_ oath?"

Recognition flashed in Serena's eyes. "Yes. That was what – " Then she seemed to take in the absolute draining of color from Lanai's face. "What? What is it?"

"You fool!" Lethe's outburst was so loud that Serena and Lanai both jumped. Hands falling from Serena's shoulders, Lanai turned to the other Senshi. Lethe's eyes were alight with the same ghastly blue fire crackling at the end of her staff. "Do you know what you've _done_?"

"Clearly she doesn't," Lanai said, her voice level in an attempt to calm Lethe. She noticed that the Nemisian had moved between Serena and Lethe as though to protect the former from the angry Senshi, and she immediately placed herself in front of both of them. If he got killed in Serena's presence when Serena could have protected him, the blood oath would kill her as well.

Serena didn't look frightened, just tired. "What?" she said again.

"Tell us how you made the oath to Diamond," was all Lanai could say. She had heard nothing of what had occurred in Serena and Darien's trip to the Silver Millennium, only what the past's Sailor Pluto had told her when she appeared to warn her that the future Endymion was coming to the present in search of his daughter for Chaos.

The skin around Serena's mouth was white. Her lips were thin. "Prince Endymion had us all trapped, in the Silver Millennium. I had to—" There was only the slightest catch to her voice, "kill him."

This was news to Lanai. Sailor Pluto had told her that she would tell Serena that Darien had to be the one to kill Endymion. The Princess Serenity's dying from one of Beryl's energy blasts instead of suicide meant that she, and her Senshi, were no longer bound for hell. But if Serena had been the one to kill Endymion…

"You realize," Lanai said lowly, "that means you and your Senshi will still go to hell, now."

Serena met her eyes. And Lanai felt her heart sink. How much further was there for her heart to sink, she wondered, how much longer before she ceased to be horrified by how deep a hole this child had dug?

"Serenity was fighting me." Serena's gaze slid away from Lanai's. "She wouldn't let me kill Endymion, and I…couldn't. Fight her. I didn't know what was her and what was me. But I realized Diamond could stop her. So I asked him to help me. He said he would." She lifted her head to look past Lanai at Sapphire, a small smile trembling on her lips. "If I swore a blood oath to protect his brother."

The prince stared back. His eyes were dark, intense, yet almost glazed over, as though he was listening to something no one else could hear.

Lanai looked away from them both. "Blood oaths are permanent and unbreakable, Serena. Now that you've sworn, you can't break the oath without dying. If Prince Sapphire here dies, you die."

Serena did not turn paler, did not react in any way to this news, as if the weight on her shoulders was already so great that the addition of this extra thing was barely noticeable. Her trembling smile only trembled a little harder. "Did you know?"

After a moment, he shook his head. "I did not." His voice was hoarse.

"Would you…do you…" Serena struggled. "Would you stay with me, for now? Please? I'll find a way to free you, it won't be– " And here she faltered, and for the first time since before Mnemosyne's sleeping powder, her eyes glimmered wetly. "It won't be for very long.

Lanai's hands fisted in her glove. Serena was _asking_ the Nemisian to stay so she wouldn't die from not protecting him. As if they were giving him a choice! "I'm sorry, Sailor Moon," she said, not sorry at all, "but he has no choice. He will be coming with us whether he likes it or not."

"I will come," said the man loudly, quickly, before Serena could protest. The look that had begun to harden her face at Lanai's words softened again as she looked at him, pained and trembling. He said again, more quietly, "I will come."

C

_**Present:**_

"Approach the Council, Princess Serenity."

Still wearing the torn fuku she had passed out in after destroying the Magellan black hole fourteen hours ago, Sailor Moon strode down the marble floor toward the half-empty dais at the end of the chamber. Three steps from its foot she stopped, crouching to one knee in the traditional posture of respect. One step behind and slightly to her right, Sailor Lanai knelt in the same pose, lowering her eyes deferentially to the floor, for she was not the one being addressed by the Council. She watched Moon carefully from the corner of her eye, for the girl had woken only an hour ago, with clear signs of power drainage, and she was even now swaying in her crouch, blinking rapidly as though having trouble focusing on the High Senshi seated before her. She would be able to contribute little to this debriefing, but perhaps that was what the High Council wanted.

A voice that Lanai identified as High Senshi Phi's spoke. "You were witnessed disobeying your commanding officer's orders, performing unauthorized experimental magic on a theta-class celestial threat, and doing the above while under the influence of an unauthorized mind-meld with a beta-class criminal."

There was a beat of silence. More blinking from Moon, then a visible attempt to gather herself as she braced one hand flat against the cold floor. "I understand," she said. "And I'm ready for…punishment. But the black hole—"

"The Council understands that this was a desperate situation, Princess," Phi interrupted. "Our concern lies in the risk you took by participating in highly dangerous sorcery that could have killed you and left the galaxies that depend on you completely vulnerable to Chaos."

Moon took a deep, shaking breath. Lanai expected her to apologize, as Moon had done almost constantly in her previous audiences with the High Council, but instead she said, "I've asked the Council many times to call me Sailor Moon. Not Princess."

There was another heartbeat of silence. Then Sailor Chi sat forward. "But you _are_ a princess, are you not?" Her voice was fierce, and only made fiercer by the blood still streaked across her cheek and hands, for she had come straight from the fighting at Entinas. She waited for Moon's reluctant nod. "Just as your Nemisian is a beta-class criminal, even if he may not want to be thought of as such. We have granted you a great deal of latitude because of who you are, _Princess_ Serenity, to the extent of breaking our sacred Senshi rules by even allowing the Nemisian onto our home planet, so until you are willing to submit to the same rules and laws that bind _real_ Senshi, do not expect us to call you one."

Silence fell even more heavily now, like concrete oozing into the empty spaces that separated them and hardening, for all that Sailor Moon was swaying to her feet, trying to fill it, saying something about black holes and too many and suspicious and the Council _cannot_ keep ignoring it! Lanai let the words wash over her without really listening to them, her attention narrowed to the faint creases etching the white fabric of Moon's gloves as her fingers tightened, and the light playing across the streamer of blonde hair resting on the marble beside her hand…

No. Wait. Lanai's head shot up. It wasn't light playing across Moon's hair, it was silver spreading slowly through it, as Moon's aura shifted just ever so slightly. The other Senshi in the room seemed to be realizing it, too; murmurs began, and the two sentry Senshi stepped protectively in front of the Council dais.

Moon didn't seem to have noticed what was happening, how her sentences were becoming staccato and stilted, the contractions melting from her speech. Lanai came to her feet, gripping Moon's arm. "Serena. _Serena_." And then Moon was looking at her with blue-violet eyes that were widening as though in realization of what was happening. Her mouth opened like she was trying to talk but closed just as quickly, and the blue in her eyes was turning dark with fear.

Then there was a gleam of gold in the corner of Lanai's eye, and someone was lifting Moon from her half crouch.

"Now, now," came Sailor Galaxia's low alto. "Up we go. Come along, Senshi Moon, none of this." Her voice was kind but no-nonsense. The silver spreading through Moon's hair slowed, then stopped. Then receded. Her energy seemed to ebb with it; Moon didn't stand so much as wilt against the supporting arm Galaxia had around her waist. She was mumbling out something, and it took a few seconds for Lanai to realize it was "Thank you."

"Not at all," said Galaxia. She turned them both around to face her Council. "You had something else to tell them?"

But the Council, and the other Senshi in the room, were still murmuring, watching Moon with eyes even more distrusting than before, and she was turning her head into Galaxia-sama's shoulder, eyes wide as though even she didn't trust herself. "No. I'm sorry. She… I let the princess get the best of me."

Galaxia squeezed her shoulder. "You will be more careful next time."

Something in her tone must have made Sailor Moon think that she expected an answer, for she said quietly, "Yes, Galaxia-sama."

Galaxia nodded once, ending the conversation, and Lanai came forward to replace Galaxia's arm with her own. She helped Moon out of the Council chamber as Galaxia raised a hand for silence.

C

The Council had granted Sailor Moon twelve hours' leave before her next mission. Twelve hours that she _should_ be using to sleep, especially considering the tremendous energy drain she'd put herself through. But Lanai knew from her assignment as one of the princess's "keepers" that sleep didn't come easily anymore to the girl whose loved ones had teasingly called her Sleeping Beauty. So, after her own debriefing with the High Council, Lanai arrived in front of the port to Moon's assigned quarters with a pouch of the sleeping powder that Sailor Mnemosyne had left with her before that ill-fated mission to Kahnsehn many months ago.

A comm and aura-scanner glowed beside the port, waiting for Lanai to identify herself. An identical set was located on the port's interior, so that only Lanai or Lethe, Moon's other High Senshi keeper, could get in or out of the Moon Princess's quarters. Even Serena herself could not open the door once she was inside her quarters, and if she had a problem with that security measure–_imprisonment, you mean_, said a well-hidden part of Lanai's mind–she had yet to voice it.

Lanai's eyes flicked to a port further down, one with a disabled aura scanner that allowed anyone to enter at any time, although the scanner inside was carefully set so that its occupant could not get out unless released from the outside. Those quarters had been grudgingly assigned by the High Council to Prince Sapphire, who could not be too far separated from the princess without endangering them all. The revelation of the blood oath that bound the princess to him had been followed closely by the discovery that, in addition to his Nemisian void-creating powers, Sapphire could read minds. Lanai wondered if even now he was sitting in his quarters listening to her treachery-riddled thoughts and smirking. She checked her mental shields again, reinforcing them, but to this day she didn't know how effective they were. More often than not the Nemisian seemed to watch her knowingly anyway, his dark eyes unreadable. Perhaps the only person powerful enough to block his abilities was Sailor Moon, and yet Lanai knew for a fact that the younger Senshi made no attempt to shield her thoughts from him, for she had often seen them communicate wordlessly on missions, Sapphire acting on some order that no one had voiced, or Moon making some strike that made no sense until Sapphire suddenly appeared behind her to follow it through.

Lanai suppressed a sigh and stepped up to the aura-scanner. It beeped sub-audibly; the port panel slid open, and she strode into Moon's quarters. Almost as quickly as she had stepped inside, she stopped short, for Moon was not only awake but sitting up in her bunk with a book. Her wings furled immediately shut in front of her to conceal it when she looked up and saw Lanai.

The concealment was in vain, for Lanai had already recognized the book. Serena had few possessions, mainly only those that had been in her Subspace Pocket when she left Earth, and of these, the only books were a few shojo manga and her sketchbook. The cover of the book in her lap hadn't been colorful enough to be a manga, which left only one possibility.

She took a step closer, letting the port panel hiss shut behind her. As Moon watched her guardedly, she wished, for not the first time, that she had not been assigned this duty. That she had been allowed the leave the Moon Princess and resume her old, uncomplicated role as a soldier Senshi, taking the good fight to Chaos creatures in systems far and sundry. Her fifteen-odd years on Terra, watching over Serena as she grew up and then lying to her when the time came, had been bad enough, but being forced to watch over the child-who-was-now-a-woman who knew that Lanai had lied to her was even worse. There was honor in fighting Chaos creatures on the battlefield. There was none in lying to a child, or in fighting at the side of a fellow warrior whose every action she had to report back to the Council.

More often than she would have liked, she felt more like Lani Lanai: art teacher, than Sailor Lanai: High Senshi, and it was the former who spoke as she sat on the edge of Moon's bunk. "I never got to see how your drawings improved while I was gone."

She sensed Moon stiffen at this, for it was rarely that Lanai dared to bring up that shared part of their lives, just as she rarely dared to call Moon "Serena" aloud. Both were a reminder of Lanai's deception, and of the life that Moon never, ever brought up. For a long moment, she expected Moon to turn around and lie down, to ignore her.

But the younger Senshi finally moved, ever so slightly, opening her wings, and handed Lanai the sketchbook. "They didn't really improve much."

There were no drawings of Darien in the sketchbook. Lanai wondered if Moon had torn them all out or if there had never been any to begin with. Sailor Jupiter and the Terran Shittenou made the most appearances, their figures and faces slightly blurred as though the penciled lines had been traced many times by trembling fingers. Some pages held drawings of people Lanai recognized as the Tsukino family, and others showed Mars, and Mercury, and even Venus.

Lanai stopped when she reached a sketch of someone she didn't recognize. It was on had clearly been turned to often: the binding was so worn at that page that the sketchbook fell limply open to it. It was a careful pencil sketch of a child with messy hair. She looked to be in lying on a bed, fallen asleep over a book. The drawing was rough, uncertain, smudged by constant revisions as almost all of Serena's sketches were.

When Lanai lifted her hand to trace the penciled lines with the edge of a fingernail, as though it would make the drawing clearer, fingers closed around her wrist. "Don't."

Lanai opened her hands in a yielding gesture. Moon let go of her wrist. Then she closed the sketchbook and put it back in her Subspace pocket. Lanai watched it disappear. "That's her?"

Moon lay down, pulling her standard-issue blue blanket over her shoulders. She touched the control panel on her wall, dimming the lights to their lowest setting. It was a clear dismissal.

Lanai stood but did not leave. The darkness made it easier to say "Serena…"

There was silence. The sound of Moon rolling over, onto her stomach. "I don't know."

Lanai waited.

"I don't know," Moon repeated, angrily. "I can't remember. It could be her. I don't _know_." A pause. Harsh breathing. "I want to be alone."

Lanai left.

C

Usually it was Lanai's duty to fetch Sailor Moon from her quarters for missions, and Lethe's to collect Sapphire from his. This time, Lanai had been instructed to collect them both herself. Had Lethe finally broken, or been forced to take a break? The other Senshi had moved as though in a feverish trance since news of her Mnemosyne's death on Kahnsehn from the ataxavirus, alternately apathetic and vicious as she carried out her duties, sometimes going a whole mission without speaking and other times lashing out at the slightest chance, as she had done to Moon on the Magellan mission. Letting Lethe continue to fight in that state was as unhealthy for her as it was for Lanai and Serena, but Lanai had dared not ask to have her removed from their roster. Lanai's own position in the Council's trust was still tenuous at best; to ask such a thing would have aroused their suspicion and, even if successful, would probably only result in them dispatching another Senshi to supervise Lanai, Moon, and Sapphire.

Lanai opened Moon's door first, stepping back so that the younger Senshi, rising from where she was waiting on her bunk, could come out. Then she put a palm to Sapphire's doorpad. The panel hissed open, revealing Sapphire standing there, blank-faced as usual, as if he had been expecting her at that very moment. As he fell into step behind Moon, she wondered if he even slept.

Mission departures were always preceded by a session in the medical unit. Although wounds from missions were nearly always tended to as soon as a Senshi returned to base, after decontamination showers that had been routine even before the ataxavirus pandemic, there was also a routine to be carried out before the Senshi left headquarters. From what she had heard from fellow Senshi, it seemed like the routines were different for each Senshi depending on their powers and xenomorphology, but they all involved another decontamination session, this time to make sure that they were not carrying anything with them. It was a time-consuming, literally nit-picking procedure.

Lanai stripped down without detransforming, lying on the table provided for that purpose as two medics leaned over her. One began to slow sweep of the scanner up her legs; the other reached into her mouth with a tiny metal hook and neatly twisted out one of Lanai's upper right molars. Lanai barely had time to taste the welling blood before the medic was cementing and stitching a fresh molar back in, this one tasting faintly of kryptonium even through the salty taste of the blood.

The medic dropped the old tooth in the biohazard waste container. "There's reason to believe Chaos found an antivenin to the cnidarite," she said, referring to the venom that had been in the tooth she had thrown away. All High Senshi—except, perhaps, Sailor Moon, Lanai realized for the first time, wondering if the Council thought her too important to sacrifice herself except in the way they had planned—were given artificial teeth in order to kill themselves should they be captured by Chaos forces. The new tooth must contain a kryptonium-based poison that Chaos's scientists hadn't engineered an antidote to yet.

The other medic was now spraying Lanai with a faint decontaminating mist that never failed to feel like icy cold bleach. She tried to ignore the sensation, focusing instead on the first medic's methodical palpations of her ribcage. She pretended the palpations didn't hurt, though she was pretty sure the medic could feel the tense quiver and involuntary flinch of her muscles, and waited.

The medic was frowning. "The indentation hardness on this abdominal armor is not what it should be."

Lanai frowned back. "They replaced it when I returned from Terra."

The medic consulted Lanai's file. "No, apparently they sanded off the uppermost layers of the plating and let it regrow. What has grown back is weaker than what it should be."

Lanai's frown was deepening. The armor the medic was referring to was a common surgical modification for bipedal Senshi whose morphologies did not include exoskeletons; Lanai's own ribcage and peritoneum were insufficient protection for her vital organs from the mechanical stress and damage she frequently sustained during battles. Centuries and centuries ago, not long after becoming a Senshi, she had been "advised" to supplement that protection with a form of prosthetic armor. The armor was essentially a bone graft, osseous tissue bioengineered from that of a long extinct reptile that had lived extremely close to a dwarf store and evolved an extremely dense yet light skeleton because of the super-high gravity it lived in, that had been fused to Lanai's own ribcage.

"I thought that once it was grafted on, the tissue was supposed to be self-maintaining."

"For the most part it is," the medic said. "But because the graft cells mitose autonomously, they also tend to mutate in response to their environment. And you spent an extended period of time on a planet with relatively low gravity. Twenty years on Terra—"

"Literally made me soft," Lanai finished, trying for wry and ending up with bitter. "Great."

The medic gave her a strange expression—"great" was not exactly a common term anywhere but Terra—and tapped Lanai's ribcage with one of her five-jointed fingers. "The way the tissue has grown, any pressure greater than four, five hundred sticktonnes is going to cave this armor right into your intestines."

Lanai pursed her lips.

"Galaxia-sama said we would need provide only a minimal work-up for you this time. Your mission is diplomatic in nature?"

"Right," Lanai said tersely. Not that that didn't mean they wouldn't see any action—ostensibly diplomatic missions had a nasty habit of turning, well, nasty. She had a feeling this might be one of them. Okians weren't known for their pacifism.

"Then we will not worry about the armor for now." The tech removed her hand from Lanai's ribcage and peeled off her gloves. "I will requisition a new batch of osteons and have them ready for a fresh graft when you return from this mission."

Lanai grimaced. "You have to remove the old one?"

"Yes."

Lanai nearly groaned. It had been a long, long time since the original grafting of the armor plating across her ribs, but not long enough for her to have forgotten the hard, scraping ache of it as it grew inside her, stretching across her ribs.

Sapphire was waiting when Lanai came out; Moon was not. Lanai glanced at the still-closed door panel of Moon's medic team and wondered for the first time if the Council's medics had "advised" any enhancements for her. If they had, Lanai would never know: medical enhancements were kept fiercely classified, not unlike medical confidentiality laws back on Earth. And forthcoming wasn't in even the top fifty words Lanai would use to describe the relationship she shared with Moon these days, so if the girl did decide on such modifications it was almost certain she wouldn't tell Lanai about it.

Moon emerged a moment later, skin slightly pink, as all of their was, from the inflammatory effect of the decontamination spray. Lanai led them into the air bay, to which the medical facility was directly connected. It was crowded, as usual; despite the disheartening loss of Senshi the past few years, anywhere from five to twenty missions might be departing at any time, Senshi and support crew bustling back and forth with supplies or final weapons checks.

Scanning the bay for threats was as automatic as breathing for Lanai, and she knew that beside her Moon was casting the same watchful gaze across the crowd. Sometimes it wrung her heart, and sometimes it made her proud, of what a soldier the girl had become. It was a bittersweet feeling. Deep down where she didn't have to admit it to herself, she wondered if it was what being a mother would have felt like.

High Senshi Phi was standing next to the theta-class shuttle they had been assigned. Next to her was Sailor Lethe. She stood in a deferential posture just behind Sailor Phi, but something about her stiff stance and the way the light reflected off her eyes screamed a simmering temper to Lanai. That answered Lanai's earlier question, then: Lethe had definitely not _chosen_ to stay behind on this mission.

Lanai wasn't surprised. Just as Lanai was kept with Moon and Sapphire to act as a chaperone of sorts to their untrusted power, Lethe had been placed on the team to keep an eye on _all_ of them. She was the loyal Senshi keeping tabs on (and control over) the as-yet-to-regain-the-Council's-full-trust Lanai. But put one tuning fork against another, and eventually their frequencies begin to coincide. The High Council couldn't afford to lose the edge—and unquestioning obedience—that they had instilled in Lethe that was so often absent in Sailor Moon. They couldn't afford for Moon to influence Lethe instead of the other way around. It was no surprise they had removed Lethe from the unit, then; the only surprise was that another High Senshi had not been added to replace her. Perhaps the Council was sending Lanai a tacit message: You have done well, and we have extended our trust in you this far. Do not give us reason to rescind it.

Lanai pursed her lips and began to push through the crowd. Within a few steps, the bustle of people began to give way around them. Moon's presence tended to have that effect. Civilians parted around her reverently, especially when said civilians were ones she had saved from a Chaos attack, while Senshi parted warily, the way one would put space between oneself and a predator, or someone with ataxafever. That wariness was even more pronounced today. Lanai could sense like a tangible weight on her back the other Senshi's speculation of what had happened with the Moon Princess in the Council chamber the day before, whether she was sane, etc.

She was so focused on listening to the mutters she heard that she almost didn't notice the hand that reached carefully for Sailor Moon's shoulder. _Almost_ being the key word. She spun, hand blurring out to grab the unwelcome hand. But Sapphire was already there, in his shadow-swift way, between Moon and the outreacher—who, Lanai saw, was one of the Sailors Starlight. The one they worked with at Magellan, in fact…Star Maker.

Maker was already pulling her hand back, not as though she'd been burned but as if she had never intended to touch Moon in the first place. Her incongruously light eyes were on Moon, intent, not on Lanai or Sapphire even though they both posed immediate threats to her, their auras carefully bristling.

"Begging your pardon, Princess," she said in a voice so low Lanai could barely hear it. "I had hoped to ask you something."

Moon never reacted to these sorts of things the way she was supposed to. Instead of ignoring Maker, she took a careful step closer. "Yes?"

Maker's eyes flicked to the others, now, and Lanai didn't miss the flash of fear in them. Maker knew she wasn't supposed to talk to Moon, knew that she wasn't even supposed to talk to most Senshi, much less the bloody Moon Princess. "In the Council chamber, you mentioned black holes—"

Moon's hand shot out. Seized Maker's. At the same moment, an aura spiked; Lanai looked to see that Sailor Phi had begun to stride toward them.

"I want to talk to you," Moon said low and fast to Maker. "Will you still be here? In a few days?"

Something grim and almost like a smile touched Maker's face. She was already melting back into the crowd. "Yes."

She was gone then, and Moon was turning back around, letting Lanai bustle her toward their shuttle and Sailor Phi. Moon was holding her head higher now, Lanai noticed, not bowing it as she had the day before.

Phi did not say anything , only nodded to acknowledge them when they reached her. Lethe stood white-lipped beside her, watching them with board with something almost like desperation. It was more than wanting to come with them because she didn't trust them to carry out the mission. It was—and Lanai was half sure she must be insane for thinking it—as if Lethe wanted to _be_ with them.

Like that, like a sudden intake of breath, Lanai realized how quickly and bizarrely people could become family. How even if you hated someone you could become dependent on them simply because they were there and they were what you _had_. She watched Moon hesitate at the top of the shuttle's boarding ramp, saw her look over the shoulder, saw the eye contact she made with Lethe. There was such deep antagonism between them, Lethe never letting Moon forget what she had lost, just as Moon, however unintentionally, was a constant reminder to Lethe of all she had lost, and yet there was support, was reassurance, in the bridge created by their locked gazes.

The moment broke, and Moon went with Sapphire into the shuttle's cockpit. Lanai pressed her palm to the panel to draw up the boarding ramp. Her eyes met Lethe's as she watched it rise. Something was exchanged between them in that moment: no relaxation, no uncoiling of tension provided by it, just another chain flung out across the divide, one more thing to pull Lanai in a direction that she wasn't supposed to be going, one more thing that tugged and hurt—but stabilized, too.

And maybe that was what it really meant, Lanai thought suddenly, not a term of ceremony or protocol but of meaning, when you called your fellow Senshi _sister_.

C

From headquarters, it was about fifteen hours to the asteroid belt at the edge of the Okian system where they would leave the shuttle before proceeding on wing to the single habitable satellite in the system. That left plenty of time for Lanai to brief Moon and Sapphire on the mission.

Chaos forces under Mistress Nine had attacked the Roan system a few weeks previous. Inhabited by a people who would on Earth have been called mermaids, Roan was of little strategic importance and as such no attempt had been mounted in its defense. A contingent of ships had been sent to evacuate as many Roans as possible off-planet as Mistress Nine's forces spread, but even those ships' number was limited, for the water-bound Roans could not survive in just any ship, had required ones whose auxiliary fuels tanks could be converted to contain them.

There had been perhaps fifteen such ships in total, each containing perhaps a few hundred Roans, and only one that had made it through Mistress Nine's blockade of the planet. But although the ship was able to make it into hyperspace, its engines had sustained terrible damage from enemy fire, and it staggered back out of hyperspace twelve system away, unable to move any further. At that point, according to the pilots' debriefings, the internal compensators had been fading, along with the oxygen scrubbers. Council support staff receiving the SOS had scrambled to find a planet close enough that the ship would be able to reach it and that would also be capable of supporting Roan physiology. The only place within range was Oke. The ship had limped its way there, and the ship's surviving crew had carefully transferred the Roan refugees into Oke's single ocean.

And things had been tense—for no planet was ever happy about hosting a refugee camp, much less on such short notice—but fine. Until a few days ago, when Okian children began disappearing in the night.

"Permit me to guess," said Sapphire in a voice almost too blank to be dry. "The Okians suspects the Roans."

"The Okians suspect the Roans," Lanai confirmed. "Considering the Roans are both carnivorous and capable of fairly strong mind influence, I can't say their suspicion is entirely without cause."

Moon had been tapping through the holos Lanai had brought along, looking at footage of Mistress Nine's blockade and database photos of Okian and Roan morphology, as Lanai briefed them. Now she spoke. "When was the last supply delivery?"

"There has not been one yet."

Moon looked up for the first time since they had boarded the ship. "But it's been three weeks since they were placed there!"

"Exactly," Lanai said. "And you know how desperate people get in these situations." Violence and refugee camps was so common it rarely even made holo news reels anymore; people killing for food was as common as Chaos attacks these days. If the Roans were feeding off Okian children it wouldn't even be the worst thing Lanai had heard of happening in refugee camps; she had heard of one on Nuat where the refugees had resorted to eating their dead.

"Why," said Moon.

"Because they are desperate," said Lanai.

"No, I mean why haven't they received supplies yet." Moon's voice was hard.

"You know why not," Lanai said tiredly. There were barely ships to evacuate them off Roan, let alone deliver supplies to them. It was one of the many reasons people were so resistant to having refugee camps placed on their planets; their own food and supplies were often rationed or requisitioned in order to help feed the refugees there.

"If the Roans are calling the Okians into the water to consume them," said Sapphire evenly, as though he has not noticed the tension between them, "it is not a subtle plan. They would have done better to hypnotize the Okians to bring actual food to them, or to call only one or a few to them at a time, not dozens." He paused. "The Roans are desperate, not stupid."

"People do stupid things when they're desperate," said Lanai, "and you are biased on their behalf, mind-reader."

Sapphire met her eyes without ire, only a knowingness that got under her skin as it always did. Lanai turned to Moon, changing the subject. "On another note, Sailor Moon, I ask that you please be more careful with the Starlight Senshi."

Moon regarded her with a neutral expression that was more Sapphire-like than anything. It struck Lanai that the girl had absorbed far more from Sapphire than she ever had from Darien, and the realization bothered her—which in itself bothered her. What was she doing, shipping them like a high school fangirl? What had Coach Etoukou called Serena and Darien—his OTP?

"Why?" Moon said.

Lanai sighed. "Sailor Phi saw you talking to Sailor Star Maker before we left."

A crack of anger in the neutral mask. "Am I not allowed to talk to other Senshi now?"

"You know what I'm trying to say," Lanai said wearily. "_I_ know that it is your right to do what you want, I am just telling you to be more careful about it."

"What is wrong with them?"

Lanai looked at Sapphire.

"The other Senshi look down on them," he elaborated. "As though they are lesser beings. Or dirty. Cursed."

Lanai did not bother asking how he had managed to read Senshi minds when every Senshi at headquarters had been told and taught how to shield their thoughts. She knew she wouldn't like the answer. "Kinmokans are born male," she said instead. "They develop female organs at puberty, but for the rest of their lives they go through cycles that sometimes return them to male forms. Their…condition, still bothers many members of the Council. Senshi are supposed to be female. To have Senshi who are…not, entirely, is blasphemy to them."

She did not look to see Moon's expression. She didn't need to.

Sapphire said, "If they are so disliked, why have they not been sent out to the front lines to die? It seems that the Council would be pleased to have an excuse for disposing of them."

Lanai swiveled her chair to look out the viewport at the mottled streaks of hyperspace. "Their princess disappeared some time ago. No one has been able to find her."

"Do they think she's…" Moon trailed off.

"Dead?" said Lanai. "Not yet." Sapphire was watching her, frowning. "The Starlights are soul-bound to her. When she dies, we will know."

"How?"

"Because they will die too."

There was a silence.

Lanai filled it. "So, _Prince Sapphire_, to answer your question, the Starlights have been kept close to headquarters in order to research severing their soul-bond to the princess. And because the Council does not think it wise to send on important missions warriors who could drop dead at any moment."

There was a soft hiss. Unwillingly, Lanai turned around. Sapphire was still standing at the portway, the door panel of which was now closed. Moon was gone. Lanai didn't need to be able to read minds to know that the Starlights' situation hit Moon close to home.

_ "You realize that means you and your Senshi will still go to hell, now."_

Too close.

C

They landed the ship in its designated spot a safe distance away from Oke. Then Lanai and Moon unfurled their wings. Teleportation was iffy when atmospheric entry was involved—gravity wells exerted strange snags in space that had never been entirely explained by science—so Sapphire went with Moon.

After the hundreds of planets they had traveled to this way, they had a routine; Sapphire extended his own aura field to protect them from space while Moon held onto him and took care of the flying. The most efficient way they had found of doing this was for Moon to hold him under the arms. Although they had done it many times, Sapphire still hadn't quite managed to train himself out of twitching every time she slid her hands under his axillae. But he also didn't try to as much as he once had, having noticed that his twitch always brought the tiniest shadow of a grin to Moon's face.

That time, though, she didn't smile; her face stayed shut down and her gaze far away, far inside. She was thinking of her own Senshi, and Sapphire felt a cold anger at Lanai for having told them about the Starlights and at himself for having asked.

There was nothing for him to do on the slow, careful approach of the planet but watch and try not to move too much in his precarious position. Not for the first time, he thought of how much easier and more dignified things would be if he had wings of his own.

However, convenient as they could be, Sailor Moon's wings had been injured more times than he could count. They were her most vulnerable spot, large and feathery targets unlike any of the other Senshi wings Sapphire had seen. Although Senshi's wings appeared to differ slightly by planet and system just as fuku did, they all generally resembled Lanai's, plain and aerodynamic, looking more like aura than feathered flesh. He had never touched them—he had gleaned that it would be the grossest indiscretion to touch a Senshi's wings—but they did not look alive, organic, as Moon's did, and on the times he had seen them damaged, they did not bleed as Moon's did.

These observations had led him to conclude that the more powerful a Senshi, the more physical the manifestation of their wings. Which only opened more questions, however—like why great power was always accompanied by such vulnerability.

The philosophical turn of his thoughts had his lips compressing. This was what he most disliked about missions, the time spent to and fro in transport, when in the silence of space there was nothing but the sound of his thoughts—and other people's—tumbling in his mind.

The Oke satellite was small, no bigger than the planet Pluto of Moon's home system. The surface was almost completely land, with a single ocean near its equator. The main city of Okiae, where it was currently night, was visible from orbit as a constellation of soft lights spangled across a peninsula that jutted into the water. There were no corresponding lights in the ocean to indicate the Roan camp's location; the water was dark, almost forbidding, in the meager lavender light from the system's distant sun.

Moon and Lanai swooped low over the water, cold air biting the uncovered skin of Sapphire's face. He slitted his eyelids against it, listening carefully to see if he could sense anything beneath the water. He was not sure how the Roans would manifest to his senses. The missions on which he accompanied Moon had brought him into contact with more species than he had ever encountered before, and he had found that there were great variations to how his powers worked depending on the species. Humanoids were easy, but the less humanoid the being the more difficulty he had reading their mind, often receiving little more than smears of intention and emotion, sometimes only buzzing.

He was fairly certain he could sense the Roans, though. There were dozens of things beneath him that felt like shafts of differently colored light dappling across sand at the bottom of the ocean floor, cast by the rippling water above. More than that he couldn't sense, and he touched his hands to Moon's to let her know to pull up.

They landed on a cliff that jutted out over the water, sloping down into the town on the shore. Sapphire stumbled only a bit upon landing, managing it without needing to tuck and roll.

"Anything?" Moon asked.

"Only that they are there."

Lanai landed silently beside them a few moments later. "I thought I detected a trace of something in orbit," she said. "But it was strange. Old. It seems more likely it was left behind by ship long ago."

"Still," said Moon. "It could have been a slaver ship with emissions we don't recognize."

Lanai didn't look convinced, but she said, "We can take a look at the Okians' ship logs, cross-reference to discern if there were any that could have left the trace I detected."

Sapphire tilted his head. He seemed to be listening to something. "Were the Okians informed we would be coming?"

Lanai grinned fierce and wolfish. "Not exactly."

C

According to the holos they had looked over in the ship, Okians were antlered, furred quadripeds approximately half Sapphire's height. What the holos didn't mention was that their antlers could be sharpened to points so sharp they could skewer a side of beef.

Lanai had stayed back to keep watch over the shore while Moon and Sapphire made their way to Okiae. When they were several dozen yards away from the first dwelling at the edge of the town, several four-legged shapes burst out of the scrub brush, bounding toward Moon and Sapphire.

Instinct had Moon's wings trying to fly open. Pain-won conditioning had her muscles seizing them back against her, flat against her back, for experience had shown they outstretched wings only frightened people into attacking and, on top of that, made a bigger, easier target for them to attack.

"Wait!" she said, the translation device in her ear transforming the words into a high-pitched chittering. "We are from the High Council!"

The Okians halted, drew back. One chittered something to the others in an angry tone that reminded her of the demonic squirrels from the park that time Nephrite had used his powers on Ami's kind gardener friend.

She sensed Sapphire's swift glance. Instead of looking back at him, she stepped sideways, into a less dense patch of shadow. She felt rather than heard the ripple of shock that went through the Okians as they saw the moon sigil glowing faintly on her forehead and the feathery wings that curled at her shoulders.

"We're here to help," she chittered before they could finish lowering themselves to their deer-like knees, as several had begun to do. "Who can tell us about the disappearances?"

"I can!" One of them clopped forward. "Both of my _miktknay_—" The translator devices weren't always so great at translating idiomatic phrases or endearments, "were asleep when we went to bed that night, and when we woke up there were gone!"

"It doesn't make sense that not one of us would wake up if someone entered our home," another of the Okians said angrily. "The only thing that could do that is if we were made to sleep, somehow—and everyone knows the Roans can make people sleep like that, with their songs!"

Sapphire was watching the Okians intently as they spoke, but Moon could tell he was paying close attention to her as well. It reminded her of someone else whose focus had always been on her even when it wasn't.

She lifted her wings. "Go with them," she told Sapphire. He could check their homes for any sign that they could have been invaded, that it wasn't the Roans' doing. "I'll be there momentarily."

She pushed into the air before Sapphire could say anything. She could sense Lanai a few kilometers away, inspecting something at the edge of town. Moon angled her wings to fly to join her, but then something moved in the corner of her eye. She turned, looking out over the ocean. At first she couldn't tell what she'd seen, if it was just the movement of the lavender-lit waves. She drifted slowly down, scanning the water and sky, until her boots brushed the water. She heard something—_something_—at the same time she saw it. Something dark sailing across the horizon.

Then—nothing.


	6. Chapter 6

**8.19.2012**** A/N****: **I've added about 4000 words to this chapter. I had intended to add them as a separate chapter, but in the long scheme of things I think this will work better. Thank you to everyone for putting up with this inconvenience, and for your kind reviews, and _huge_ thanks to JadeEye for posting. I miss you, girl!

**For ally0212**: Thanks for your questions about writing in your last review! Instead of posting them here, I've put them up on the Google STC site so ffdotnet doesn't ban me for putting non-story stuff in the chapter. I hope the answers are helpful (sorry for the wait!), and please e-mail me if there's anything else I can help with!

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon.

**Date:** 8.19.12, 7.7.12

**Warnings: **for **Language** and **Gore**.

-o-

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Six: Siren

-o-

"Did we remember the sandwiches, Odango?"

"Did _we_ remember the sandwiches?" echoes Serena. She tilts a wink at Rini, who's sliding out of the car. "I'm pretty sure it was your job to pack them."

"Uh, no," Darien says, hefting the cooler from the back seat and slanting a look at her from under his baseball cap. "I clearly recall putting the human vacuum in charge of the food. Right, Rini?"

"I wasn't paying attention." Rini tilts her head innocently, pulling her bag of sand toys out of the trunk and slinging it over her sharp little shoulder. "I guess we'll just have to get pizza."

Darien makes an exasperated sound under his breath, eyeing her and then Serena as if he can tell they've plotted to replace the healthy lunch he had planned with pizza from that cheap pizza shack on the pier that Serena adores and the pizza of which Darien swears is made of fifty percent grease, forty percent sand, and ten percent actual food ingredients.

"I want sausage on mine," Rini says as they start down the sand toward the water. She's trotting, sliding a little in the sand on her brand-new pink flip-flops that match the new swimsuit Serena just bought her—or would match it, if Rini didn't insist on wearing a t-shirt over it. Serena finds herself sighing in exasperation and directing a mock-annoyed glare at Darien, who's probably the one Rini got the idea from in the first place, always wearing that white t-shirt over his swim trunks. One of these days she's going to make him come to the beach in all his bare-chested glory. If he can prance around in a tuxedo and cape all night in full view of the entire city, he can certainly handle a little bare skin at the beach.

Rini drops her bag at a bare patch of sand and takes off for the water, a red pail already in hand. Serena dumps the towels she's been carrying and spreads her arms to catch the refreshing wind, tilting her head back. Darien's hand brushes against the nape of her neck and then sifts up into her hair, which he braided up Princess Leia-style for her that morning, his fingers lifting the heavy masses of hair away from her scalp so the wind can reach it. Serena makes a happy noise and leans back against him, reaching backward to run her fingers through his hair, too. She can feel the warm perspiration gathered there beneath his baseball cap, and she turns in his arm to sift through his hair with her other hand, too, pushing off the cap and feathering his bangs with her thumbs. He grins, his eyes finding her through the blue lenses of his sunglasses, then focus on something behind her.

"Mayday," he says. "Disgruntled daughter approaching."

Serena smiles and turns around just in time to see Rini stomping up to them with a sloshing pail of ocean water. "Could you guys at least sit down if you're going to be embarrassing? It's like you _want_ people to stare at you."

Laughing, they break apart. Darien wrestles the beach umbrella out of its bag while Serena shakes out some towels for them to sit on. Rini squats down amid her beach toys, carefully selecting the ones she'll need and pausing every so often to glare at seagulls who come too close to her sand castle construction site. Serena has to stuff a fist into her mouth to keep from laughing every time: Rini's glares from beneath her floppy beach hat are the most adorable thing she has ever seen. She can't tear her eyes away from that beloved face, can't stop drinking it in, and by the third hug she squeezes Rini into, Rini's whining, "Daaaad, Mom won't stop hugging me—"

-o-

Moon blinked.

She was in a dark chamber. The cloudless blue sky was gone. The warmth of the beating sun was gone. Darien was gone. The memory of the little girl, Ri—Ro—? Re—? God, Serena couldn't even remember her _name_, much less the color of her eyes or how she'd looked when she smiled.

Sapphire was unconscious next to her, crumpled on his side. For a moment that wasn't as fleeting as it should have been, Moon thought about squeezing her neck until she blacked out into the same unconsciousness. Where she could chase the dream, find that little girl again…

She pushed herself to her feet. The floor was cold against her gloved palms where she braced her hands against it; she recognized the feel of it. They were in one of Sapphire's voids, the dark walls around them solid and yet insubstantial, as though they were inside a tank surrounded by pitch black water instead of a room enclosed by solid walls.

Sapphire's abdomen moved slowly as he breathed, the tiny crystals on his tunic winking in the weird light. Moon brushed a hand carefully down his front, checking for wounds, then checked his head and neck, cradling his jaw carefully so she wouldn't jostle his spine if there was damage. He could heal faster than a Terran did, but he had nowhere near the accelerated healing of a Senshi, and if she couldn't wake him up she didn't know how, or if, they could get out of this void.

But Sapphire was stiffening under her touch, coming to with a hiss of pain. He rolled over slowly, hand coming up to his face. A purple bruise darkened it from face to lip to cheekbone. Only then did Moon notice how his jaw hung strangely, too slack: dislocated.

Sapphire braced his gloved hands against it before Moon could offer assistance and thrust it up with the heel of his palm, inhaling sharply. He blinked back the moisture that sprang to his eyes and met hers.

"Your wing packs a powerful punch," he said carefully through his closed teeth, answering the question she hadn't asked.

Remorse welled up in her. But Sapphire lifted a hand. His voice was hoarse, as though the scream of pain he had not let out when resetting his jaw had loosed itself down his throat, shredding his voice instead of the air. "No guilt, please. I believe I gave as good as I got."

Moon frowned at him, then turned her head to follow his gaze over her shoulder. Her right wing greeted her, the carpometacarpus twisted at a bloodied, grotesque angle. Silver energy buzzed in and around it.

"I was forced to fairly desperate measures," Sapphire said. "That music carried trance-magic. I could not break you from it. You were trying to fly out to sea, and when I tried to stop you—" He gestured at his face. "I seized you to transport us here, where you the compulsion could not reach you."

"Music?" Moon repeated.

"Is that not what you heard?"

Moon frowned, trying to hold onto the memories of that small, blurred face as the less fuzzy memories of her patrol over the water crowded them out. "I think so. Like—a flute?"

Sapphire nodded. "Yes."

"You heard it too?" At Sapphire's nod, Moon's hand clenched unconsciously. "Did you—"

Sapphire read the thought in her mind before she had to say it. "Yes. A vision of my own, not yours. I am sorry."

She didn't ask what he was sorry for—not dreaming of her would-have-been-daughter so that he could have helped Moon remember what she looked like? What her laugh sounded like? "What…what was it?"

"A dream compulsion of some kind?" Sapphire moved his shoulders slightly, a not-quite-shrug. Accompanied by some sort of compulsion to approach the music's source, at least for you."

"Not you?" Moon murmured absently, already following the path of his thoughts: a forced dream-state and compulsions like this could certainly explain how the Okians' young had vanished over night. Whatever had played the music could have, like a Pied Piper, led them right out of their homes.

"I was lulled by the music but felt no compulsion onward." Sapphire put his hand carefully above her mangled wing. "This requires rebreaking. Shall I do it now?"

Moon nodded absently again, sitting back on her heels and extending the wing as far as she could. The injured muscles in her shoulder spasmed in protest at the movement. Sapphire shrugged off his dark outer tunic and rolled it up neatly, handing it to her over her uninjured shoulder. She put it in her mouth, closing her teeth around the fabric and smelling the faintly salty sweat that dampened it. Darien's silky, sweaty hair, their daughter's tan, skinny arms, flashed through her mind.

Sapphire put his hands lightly to the delicate bone of Moon's wing. "On three. One, two—" _Shikk_.

Moon gagged against Sapphire's tunic. Kept her teeth clenched around it, held back the bile that slammed up her throat. Distantly she felt her bones and muscles begin to reknit, and breathed shallowly through her nose until the worst of it was over. Then she pulled Sapphire's tunic from her mouth and handed it back to him, blinking her eyes dry as he had done a few moments before.

He pulled it back on. "I had not counted on succumbing to unconsciousness myself. I do not know how long we have been here."

In other words, he hadn't notified Lanai before he and Moon ended up unconscious in his void. The older Senshi would undoubtedly be worried. Moon flexed her wing carefully and put a hand flat against Sapphire's shoulder blade. He opened a new portal, and they stepped through it back to Okiae.

-o-

One moment Lanai was squinting out at the dazzling white dawn spilling across the ocean's horizon and trying to make out the source of the disembodied wails that were ghosting toward them from said horizon and making the Okians toss their furry heads in agitation. The next, Sailor Moon and Sapphire were right in front of her, stepping out of thin air into the surf. Sparks of silver power dripped from one of Moon's wings, falling into the foamy water and glowing amid the shells.

Lanai was upon Moon so quickly she nearly bowled her over. "Where were you!"

Moon opened her mouth. But the ghostly wailing spiked abruptly into a shriek that howled around them like hurricane winds. Dark spots became visible in the water along the horizon, racing rapidly toward the shore.

Sapphire was saying something. It took Lanai a moment, over the dreadful racket, to discern what it was: _Roans_.

But her mind was already putty by then, her feet dragging her forward into the surf without her permission. The wailing had become a feeling instead of a sound, a pressure bearing down on her eardrums and somewhere deeper. She staggered, stumbled.

_Beasts_

_ Comehereyoubeasts_

_ COME youBEAS— _

Pain, and clarity. A gloved hand squeezing her elbow hard enough to bruise. She blinked, saw Sapphire's sweat-sheened face. Looked around, saw Moon on his other side, and the Okians around them making their way slowly and stiltedly into the water. Like puppets with their strings being pulled. Their fur darkened where the water swirled around their legs, foaming angrily.

With Sapphire's mental shielding, Lanai could detect the pressure was what it was now, the enraged, unbroken scream of dozens of Roans. But it was still more feeling than sound, the weight of it against her ears and mind making her nose and eyes stream. She swiped at them as dark heads rose out of the frothing water a few meters away. She had only the impression of glistening skin and gleaming, needle-like teeth before she squeezed her eyes shut to concentrate. Her paintbrush had materialized in her hands, and she sliced it through the air, painting boulders to hover in the air between them and the Roans. They were large, larger than anything she had

paint-summoned before. Large enough to fall into the water and create a wall that would block the Roans from the Okians, whom they were pulling into the water toward them with their song. They trembled in the air like living things, waiting on Lanai's order to fall.

But as she released them, there was a high splitting note, like the voice of an impossibly soprano opera singer. The boulders cracked down the middle in midair. Then the voice _screamed_ higher, and the boulders exploded into gray dust, billowing harmlessly down to the water.

Lanai blinked through it, feeling it sting her eyes, to squint at the Roan who had sang the impossible notes. She had almost colorless blue hair, her pupil-less dark eyes fixed on Lanai's through the dust. Lanai felt the hatred in them like a punch to the gut.

The Roan was still scream-singing, her needle-filled mouth open in an O. The splitting note climbed higher, weaving in and out of the hypnotic singing. Lanai felt something rupture inside her ears. Heat trickled out. She slumped to her knees as Sapphire's fingers dug harder into her elbow. She was dimly aware of him wavering as well, of the Okians swaying, collapsing forward into the water around them, and felt a muffled panic—the Roans moving forward with their rage and sharp teeth—

"_**Stop**_."

Moon's yell was long and drawn-out. It wriggled past and under the Roan's siren song, shoving itself into Lanai's ears and deafening her to anything else. The pressure on her ears and mind lessened; she shoved herself to her feet. Saw the Okians scrambling backward in the water, eyes wide and blinking rapidly as they were freed from the trance of the Roans' voices.

The Roans had not stopped singing, had if anything grown louder. Lanai glanced toward Moon, whose mouth was still open in a long, wordless shout hurled back against the Roans' song. The barrettes in her buns shone in the hazy air, magically amplifying her shout and making it echo out across the water. She was staring down the Roans, who had retreated slightly to bob in the deeper water, staring back with dark, glittering malice.

Moon's voice finally died. But her barrettes pulsed with light before the Roans could take hold of anyone's mind again; their song broke off in a splinter of unearthly voices, their mouths snapping shut. Their glistening dark eyes snapped wide in surprise; a few thrashed backward in alarm.

Moon took a step forward into the water. "That is _enough_." The translator device transformed her words into the alternating hiss and burble of Roan speech. It sounded predatory, issuing from her mouth as her barrettes glowed hot with power.

All was still.

Then the Roan who had sang so splittingly lunged forward. Water thrashed around her, reminding Lanai of clips she had seen on Earth of crocodiles lunging suddenly forward onto their prey. But just as quickly, Sapphire was straddling the Roan from behind, one arm crooked around her chest to pin her arms to her side in the water and the other holding a sharp crystal to her throat.

"No!" Moon shouted.

"She means to attack you." Sapphire's eyes looked as black as the Roan's as he leaned forward over her, keeping her half-submerged in the water. She thrashed her tail, soaking him from head to foot, but he didn't flinch, just tightened his hold on her neck so that gleaming golden ichor trickled from the point of his crystal. "She has promised her people blood."

Moon stared at him. He stared back from beneath his dripping bangs, hand relaxing for a moment, and the Roan immediately took advantage of his distraction. She gave a powerful thrash, wrenching herself out of Sapphire's arm and back into the water. A single thrash of her tail sent her shooting back into the midst of her people, who moved immediately to encircle her, teeth bared.

"You. Took. Our. _Children_," she hissed out from between her sharp teeth, glaring poison. "_Return them_!"

The Okians around Lanai lurched forward a step as Lanai jerked. Sapphire appeared behind her and Moon immediately, putting hands to their shoulders and draining off the siren influence.

Lanai stepped forward, pushing one of her wings out behind her to maintain contact with Sapphire's hand. "Your children have disappeared?"

"As if you did not know, Senshi," spat the Roan Sapphire had cut. Behind her, the Roans were murmuring to each other in angry, unintelligible murmurs as their black eyes burned into the Senshi. Several sang out things that sounded like accusations. "Do you think us stupid? The Okians' calves disappear and they cry out for Roan blood? They threaten revenge, threaten retribution? You will know retribution! Our children will know the taste of your innards when we feed you to them! _Give them back!_"

The water was beginning to thrash up again, foaming and hissing. Some of the Okians were rearing up on their hind legs, tossing their heads with their pointed antlers. Lanai stepped quickly between them, holding up her hands.

"No one here took your children!" she shouted. "I have been here with the Okians all night, and none of them entered the water!" She took another step forward into, keeping her wingtip against Sapphire's hand. "When did your young disappear?"

"Stay out of this, Senshi," one of the other Roans snapped, a male with pale hair pulled back in two tails and violet scales trailing from his cheekbones up into his hairline.

"They woke to find them gone." It was Sapphire's voice; Lanai turned to see that he was looking intently at the Roans. "No more than…an hour ago, common time."

The Roans' eyes widened; several shot forward in the water, hissing. They came up half out of the water, glistening chests exposed and many riddled with half-healed wounds.

"Stay out of our minds," the female Roan hissed from behind them.

"As you stayed out of the Okians'?" Sapphire said. "Be glad I am only reading them, Aya."

The Roan narrowed her eyes, bared her teeth at Sapphire's use of her name. "What are you?"

"One who has encountered the same prejudice as you," Sapphire said simply. "Please allow us to help you."

Aya, swam closer. She moved in a zigzag, her movements shark-like as she watched him. "How have these Senshi bound you to them, cousin?"

"With chains I could unlock myself, should I choose to," he said. "Please tell us what you know. You remember waking but not falling asleep. Was there music? Did something lull you into slumber?"

"There was music." It was a rougher voice that spoke, like gravel, and a male Roan moved from behind the other Roans to float just behind Aya. He was submerged but for his head, long black hair floating in tendrils around him, staying so low within the water that it flowed into his mouth and bubbled as he spoke. "I was on the night-watch, and there was music like pipes playing. Beautiful."

Aya had turned to look at him sharply. "Angluuk is right," she said lowly. "I heard this also. Who else heard music?"

This last was directed to the Roans spread out behind her. They did not answer in a way Lanai could hear, but she felt strange phantoms of their auras reaching out toward Aya, brushing up against her like seaweed in the water. Her eyelids floated half shut as she listened, her face still and stern as marble.

"All of them," Sapphire said. He, then, could understand at least part of the Roans' telepathic communication with each other.

Aya opened her eyes, looked straight at him. "How do you know of this music?"

"We heard it," Moon said. "We were watching over Okiae last night to see if what had stolen the Okians' young would return. I saw something that looked like a ship floating over the water far away, but the next thing I knew, I was waking up from a very vivid dream. A pleasant one." She paused, looking out over the Okians and repeating her words in the Okians' language. "You mentioned waking and finding your children gone. Does the Roans' account match your own experiences?"

Murmurs, chittering and hissing, broke out among them.

"I saw no ship before my _miktknay_ disappeared," said the Okian boroughmaster, Chtulk, to whom Lanai had been speaking when she sensed Moon's aura disappear. "But the dreams—my mate and I both woke from very clear dreams."

"My mate and I as well," said another Okian, and another.

Lanai listened to them but watched Moon, who was listening intently to both the Okians and Roans as Sapphire kept several fingertips carefully against her wing joint. Vivid dreams didn't explain why she and Sapphire had disappeared into one of his voids, and exactly what kind of vivid dreams were they talking about here? The show-up-to-a-briefing-naked kind or the oh-god-_yes_ kind? They shared tight quarters on many of their missions, and more than once while serving her shift of their night watch Lanai had borne witness to Moon arching in whatever bedding she was occupying at the time and making sounds that left no doubt as to the contents of her dream. At the moment Moon looked exhausted and haunted, the same way she so often did on nights after such dreams, but she had spoken of the dream to their alien audience without any hesitation or embarrassment, so Lanai didn't think it had been that kind of dream. So what had it been? Had she dreamed of being back on Earth with her Senshi? Of her mother, her father, her family?

Not that it mattered what she had dreamt of. Regardless of what it was, it wasn't as if Lanai could give it to her. She could not take Serena back to Earth, or give her back her mother or her daughter-from-the-future, or even bring her Senshi-sisters to her. All Lanai could give was herself. That hadn't been enough so far, and probably never would be.

She looked away from Moon and toward the Roans. Aya was watching them suspiciously, despair flattening her black glare.

Moon seemed to notice, too, for she took a step forward in the water. "We'll find them, Aya," she said firmly. "They're going to be all right."

Something flashed in the Roan's eyes. "Do not patronize me with your false promises," she said fiercely, her lips just above the water. She was bobbing with only part of her head above the water, her pale hair billowing in the water. "We were promised protection when we were taken from our planet, and instead we watched our people suffocate in cold space. We were promised refuge when we were placed here, and instead we have starved in icy waters, hunted for a crime we did not commit. Now you promise to find our children?" She lifted her chin and spat into the water. "That is what your promise is worth to me."

For a moment all was still. Then one of the Okians snarled, lumbering forward with his gleaming, sharpened antlers. "That is the Moon Princess! You _dare_ to spit at her feet?!"

Aya hissed at him, a sharp predatory explosion of sound like a cobra striking. The Okian pawed at the sand then rushed forward, head lowered so that his sharpened antlers extended before him. Moon cried out and grabbed him, arms around his neck as Sapphire grabbed on as well, adding his strength to hold the Okian back.

"We'll find them," Moon cried out breathlessly over her shoulder to Aya. "I promise, Aya, we won't leave until we've found them!"

Aya looked at her, eyes hard and gleaming. "Swear it with your blood, Senshi." She drew a long, sharp shell from under the water, its edge razor-sharp.

Lanai watched Moon lean forward to take it, then the abrupt dismay in her expression as she remembered. Her Senshi were still bound to her, and now damned to hell along with her all over again. If she swore a blood oath here and couldn't keep it, if she died here before she'd had the chance to find a way to free her Senshi from their bindings to her—

"I swear it."

Lanai heard it as though someone else had spoken it, only realized it had been her own voice when she felt the sting of her knife biting into her arm. She inhaled, smeared the blood down her wrist with her free hand and held it up, palm open, for a moment, before stepping forward into the water and putting her hand beneath its surface. "I swear on my blood that we will find your stolen children."

She broke her gaze with Aya to look over the rest of the Roans, back at the Okians and their leaders. "But we will need time, and aid. Can we trust you to provide help for us, should we need it?" She repeated her question in Okian.

The Okians chittered agreement. Loudest was Chthulk, who said loudly, "You have our pledge."

The Roans did not speak as one, only sank beneath the waves save for the violet-scaled male. He looked straight at Lanai and said, "We will do whatever we must to find them."

It was not a pledge of support, exactly, but Lanai nodded. The Roan disappeared and reappeared several dozen meters out among his people, their pale heads bobbing above the waves as they headed away from the shore. They split in several directions—probably, Lanai thought grimly, to begin their own search.

Moon turned to her. She spoke lowly, so that the Okians still surrounding them would not hear. "Thank you, Lanai."

Lanai was still staring after the pale head that she thought was Aya's. The blood on her wrist had already dried in the salty breeze, stiff as she unclenched her hand. "You would have done it yourself if you could." She wasn't sure if she meant this to be comforting or reproachful and so she moved on instead, turning to look down at Moon. "I would like a more detailed explanation, please, of what took place."

-o-

If the Roans hadn't been the ones to steal the Okian children, Lanai's next best—or worst—bet was slavers. Slavery had never been quite completely eradicated from the universe, and with the renewed war with Chaos it had flared back up again like a bad case of herpesvirus. Slaving groups most often targeted refugees since they were weakened, vulnerable groups often left without any protection beside that which they could provide themselves. The Roans were lucky in that respect, at least, able to use their voices as weapons.

Slavers also took advantage of the fact that refugees were often resented by the planets that hosted them—Lanai had lost count of the number of times she had heard of being working with slavers to have refugees removed from their planet. In the last year alone the Council had uncovered three incidents in which planetary officials had cut deals with slaving groups that provided slaves to Chaos. Sometimes it was from greed, sometimes because the slavers promised Chaos would leave the host planet alone if it sold out the refugees. Lanai had tried not to judge the people who made deals for the latter—survival was survival—until a mission to Emnock to sabotage Chaos' largest acidock farm. There she had seen Venomi refugees in the acidock aviaries, nailed by their four hands to tall posts where the acidocks could swoop in and pluck bites of the Venomi's fleshy blue guts where their bellies had been slit open to let them hang out. Since then she'd had no patience for those who sold refugees to slavers, and the thought that it could be slavers who'd taken the Okian and Roan children, the terrible question of what the slavers would be targeting children, specifically, for, made Lanai's own guts churn.

So perhaps Sapphire and Moon's news that Moon, too, had been drawn to the hypnotic music should have made Lanai feel better, that maybe it wasn't just children the kidnappers wanted.

It made her feel worse.

"You were walking _toward_ it?" she repeated. They had moved to an outcropping halfway up the cliff that overlooked Okiae and jutted out over the shore so that they could keep an eye on both the city and the ocean. Moon sat on the chalky rock, as did Sapphire, keeping his eyes closed as they spoke to maintain a mental eye on the area. Lanai had crouched, one hand planted flat on the rock.

"I don't like this," Lanai said when they were done. She crouched. "Ser—Moon, you were drawn to this music?"

"Apparently." Moon looked at Sapphire, who nodded a confirmation.

Lanai stood. Why Moon as well as the children? Was it a fluke? Or was it intentional? If it was intentional, anyone, or thing, with the guts to think they could handle the Moon Princess was either worryingly powerful or worryingly insane, and Lanai wasn't sure which one was worse. If it wasn't intentional but Moon had been drawn into the spell anyway, that might be a clue as to what the spell was targeting in the children, how it recognized them and drew only them to its caster. She could think of one thing, right off the bat, that Moon and young children had in common.

"No," Sapphire said. "You are wrong."

Lanai glared at him even as disappointment settled over her. _What do you know of innocence?_ she thought bitterly at him.

Sapphire said nothing. Silent, infuriating, dark-eyed bastard.

Lanai began to pace. Only when a few minutes had passed did she finally stop. "My knowledge of slumber-spells is limited," she said reluctantly. "Especially if dreamcasting is also involved."

"Lethe might know."

Lanai looked at Moon incredulously. "What would _Lethe_ know of casting dream spells?" Lethe was one of the most no-nonsense Senshi Lanai had ever met, the spells she casted—had cast—with her sister Mnemosyne being the only exception. She spurned spell work in almost all its forms, preferring brute force and blasting magic.

"Sometimes we hate most what we know best," Sapphire said.

Lanai turned away to keep herself from rolling her eyes. He no doubt picked up on her reaction but appeared to ignore it, saying, "In the creation myths, the river from which Lethe originated flows through the realms of sleep and dream."

Lanai began to shake her head in incredulity. Moon's quiet voice stopped her. " 'Through Hypnos' cave the Lethe flows / Around Elysion's fields it goes, ' " she murmured. " 'From rushing river to silent stream / So it is from sleep to dream.' "

It was a stanza from an old set of stories, the universe's version of the Earthlings' Greek myths like the _Iliad_ or the _Aeneid_. Lanai hadn't known Moon had even known they existed, much less read them, and the discovery released unease into her mind. What else had she missed about her charge?

She lowered herself to her feet, unsettled, and made no move to stop Moon when she reached to her ear to activate the subcutaneous transmitter implanted there, nor when she widened the transmission band to transmit to Sapphire and Lanai's subcutaneous receivers as well.

The transmission connected after three bursts of static. "Lethe," said Lethe's voice, sounding bored. The familiarity of it relaxed some of the knots in Lanai's gut. Feigning she didn't care that they had called was so very _Lethe_.

"It is us," Sapphire said, unnecessarily, and the snort he received in return was well-deserved, in Lanai's opinion.

"No, really?" Lanai could practically hear Lethe's eyes rolling. "What is it? Have you found it so difficult to function without me?"

"Apparently," Lanai said. She explained what had taken place, with occasional input from Moon and Sapphire.

When they were done, Lethe made a noncommittal sound. "And you think I can help you with this why?"

Lanai was too professional to shoot Sapphire a told-you-so look. "Something to do with your connection to Elysion, apparently."

Lethe was quiet for so long that Lanai checked to make sure the connection hadn't terminated. "I never bothered much with the Elysian side of our powers." Unspoken was _That was Mnemosyne's area_. She cleared her throat. "At any rate, your next move must be obvious even to you feces-for-brains."

Lanai found herself exchanging a glance with Sapphire. "Do enlighten us, Lethe," she said dryly.

"If the kidnappers' spell targeted the children _and_ Moon, then your best chance to draw them back for capture is to use Little Miss Princess as bait."

"No," said Lanai instantly.

She looked at Moon. The lack of surprise on the younger Senshi's face made Lanai wonder if this wasn't why Moon had suggested calling Lethe in the first place. Lethe was the one of their group who worried the least about Moon's welfare, the only one who would press for her to be endangered like this.

"It's the only real option we have," Moon said calmly into the silence. "None of us has been able to pick up any sort of aura trail."

"It is _not_ an option," Lanai retorted, trying to keep as calm and failing: Her voice rose slightly.

Lethe made an impatient sound. "Stop being a fool, Lanai."

Lanai spun toward the transmitter as though Lethe could see her. "We are not using the _Moon Princess_ as _bait_!"

"Not bait. Incentive."

Lanai didn't have to listen to this. "Thank you, Lethe," she said shortly and cut off the transmission. "Back to reconnaissance," she said to Sapphire and Moon. "Maintain a quadrant-by-quadrant patrol of Okiae and the ocean, as far out as Sapphire can detect Roan presences." She spread her wings, barely paused when Moon called her name.

"Where are you going?" she demanded.

"To see if the Okian children in the continent's inland valleys there have been taken too." Lanai rose into the air and did not say, _To see if there is anyone we can use as bait instead of you_.

-o-

Moon watched Lanai disappear on the horizon. Then she turned to Sapphire. "It looks like we might have to do this bait thing on our own," she said, pulling her hair back with one hand to keep the spray-filled wind from blowing it into her face. "Is there any way you could make me, I don't know, _louder_ to whatever psychic detectors they have going?"

"It depends on what drew you to them." Sapphire inclined his head ever so slightly in a gesture Moon recognized as one of doubt. "If it is mentally based and not some other sort of magic, then yes, I can…unravel the ends of your thoughts. Make them flutter in the wind, you might say, to draw their attention."

Moon closed her eyes. "Okay. Do that, then."

"However, it will also make your mind more visible to me." Sapphire did not step closer. "Is there anything you wish to hide, first?"

Moon didn't open her eyes. "I trust you in my head more than I trust myself, Sapphire."

A moment passed. Then she felt the shadow of Sapphire's hand fall over her face, his fingertips brush her forehead. There was a brief loosening inside her skull, almost like when she'd gotten water in her ear after swimming and it was trickling out. She opened her eyes, looked at Sapphire, who was watching her more carefully than he had before. She caught a wisp of dismay in his mind—_she wants to go _back—streaking into her own before he snatched it back.

She resettled her wings along her shoulders, tried not to think about the desire he'd overheard. The smell of Darien's skin, the slap of small sandals on sand. "What now?" she said brightly. "Should I move around, broadcast that I'm here? Think _Come get me, you pedophiles_?"

"I do not believe it will make a difference," Sapphire said with a small quirk of his lips. "Perhaps we should move away from the city, however, to avoid collateral damage should this work."

"Good point," and she took flight, picturing in her mind a tiny island—barely more than an outcropping of rock—that she had seen in the ocean, perhaps sixty kilometers from shore, during their initial approach to Okiae. Sapphire was standing there when she coasted down to land, one of his black voids sealing shut behind him.

"Now we wait?"

"Now we wait," he confirmed. They sat, Moon's recently injured-and-healed wing trembling slightly from the exertion of her flight. She pulled two nutri-pacs from her Subspace Pocket and handed one to Sapphire. He tore his open carefully at one corner while she tugged at hers with her teeth, finally managing to rip it awkwardly across the bottom, losing half of the paste-like contents on the cold rock. "Here," he said, and traded his pac for hers. "I am not very hungry."

"You never are," she said, bumping his shoulder but accepting the pac. She sucked thoughtfully from it for a moment, eyes unfocused on the midday sun reflecting on the waves as she probed tentatively at the unravelled ends of her mind like a tongue worrying a loose tooth. Then she looked up at Sapphire. "What did you see in your dream?"

She felt the gentle pressure of him thinking, creating an answer that didn't have to do with his brother. "A new brand of shampoo."

It startled a laugh out of her around the nutri-pac. "Don't you mean shampoo, period?" Unlike the Senshi, who got the equivalent of a shower every time they retransformed, Sapphire had to bathe for real, and they often didn't have the time, space or supplies for him to do so. Most times, he was lucky to have soap, much less shampoo.

"Perhaps," he conceded.

"Maybe some barrettes too," she said, tapping her own. "To keep your hair out of your eyes."

She felt that gentle pressure again, him actually considering it. "A head band would work better, I think."

Moon looked at him very hard, screwing up her eyes as though straining to imagine it. "I can't picture you with your forehead on display like that. It feels inappropriate."

"I see," Sapphire said. "You are allowed to bare leg and breast in your fuku, but I bare a little forehead and it is inappropriate."

Moon chortled, and he smiled. It was pleasant enough that Moon almost began to wonder if she had been hypnotized back to sleep and was dreaming again.

_"Daaaad, Mom won't stop hugging me—"_

Almost.

- o -

An hour passed, then two. The weirdly angled sunlight from the system's two suns—anything but a single yellow star would always feel wrong to her—bounced too-brightly off the choppy waves, cutting into Moon's eyes like sharp glass. She squinted out at it, sometimes fancying she could see darker spots between the waves, wondering if maybe if one of the Roans had been sent to watch them. They wouldn't be pleased with what they saw, if so; to anyone watching it looked as if Sapphire and Moon were just sitting, rather than looking for the missing children. Guilt gnawed at Moon's patience: What if the kidnappers were already far away, too far away to sense Moon and come back, and she _was_ just sitting here uselessly?

Her indecision was ended a moment later when an aura appeared at the edge of her senses and streaked toward them. She spun, raising her arm, but Lanai swooped into Sapphire instead, sending him crashing into the water.

"Undo it," she snapped. Her aura slapped at the edges of Moon's, frantic like someone trying to pat out flames with their hands.

"Lanai," Moon began.

"You're burning like a magnesium flare!" Lanai snapped at her. "I'm gone for a minute and this is what you do?" She spun back toward Sapphire, dragging him up by his collar. "Fix it, now."

Moon's ear began to beep madly. From Lanai's sudden tensing, she heard it, too. She loosed a hand from Sapphire's collar, enough to let him lever himself to his feet, and activated her sub-Q chip, the click in Moon's ear letting her know the transmission had been widened to all their receivers. "Lethe?"

"I found something." Lethe's voice was breathless, huffing into the transmitter with bursts of static like she was running. "Sailor Star Maker ha—"

Static burst across the connection. "Lethe!" Moon said sharply, but a new voice was already spilling across the transmission. "This is Galaxia! We are under fire at coordinates io-omicron-deltalpha-sigma-30, all available Senshi are ordered to the site! This is a Code Black threat, authorization code five-nine-zero-six-six, I repeat, coordinates io-omicron-delalpha—"

The transmission cut off with another crackle of static. Moon looked over at Lanai, saw her eyes wide in a white face. Code Black meant a Core hyperspace route was compromised by Chaos forces. The coordinates meant it had to be the Entero Arm. Chaos control of the Arm would crack open the Entero Spiral, with all its two thousand inhabited planets, and leave the High Council's Core HQ base a sitting duck for a Chaos attack.

At hyper speed, Moon could get to Galaxia's coordinates within two and a half hours.

"Go," Lanai said.

"No—" Moon said automatically.

Sapphire was trying to raise Lethe on the transmitter again. "Lethe. Lethe, do you copy?"

"Whatever she found, it will have to wait," Lanai said sharply when only static answered. "This takes priority. Go."

"We can't leave you here," Moon said and hated the way she could hear Serena in her voice, Serena scared and pleading. "If I leave the kidnappers won't come back—and if you can't find them—" _the blood oath will kill you._

"Do you think so little of me?" Lanai's voice was hard, her face the same. "I carried out missions successfully for centuries before you came along, Moon. Do not make the mistake of thinking you are essential here."

That stung, for all that she knew Lanai was saying it to lash her into leaving. Moon forced the hurt back, reining Serena in, reminding herself, _Lanai and a hundred children lost here are nothing to the billions in the Spiral._

"Then Sapphire will stay with you," she said, looking at Sapphire.

"No," said Lanai.

"_Yes_," said Moon.

Sapphire reached out for Moon, caught her elbow. "We are leaving," he said over his shoulder to Lanai, and at his gentle pressure on the inside of her arm, Moon reluctantly took flight, holding Sapphire under the arms just as she had when they came into the planet's atmosphere.

Sapphire pressed her arm gently again when they were far up in the satellite's thermosphere, out of range of Lanai's senses. "I will stay here, in a void. She will not see me."

Moon caught his arm as he freed one shoulder from her grip to climb into the familiar black space opening beside them. "You'll watch out for her?"

Sapphire looked over his shoulder at her. "Why else would I stay?"

She squeezed his arm in thanks and waited to make sure the void sealed shut behind him. He was less likely to be hurt here, on the trail of slavers, than with her fighting Chaos creatures, so by leaving him here, both Sapphire and Lanai were safer than they would be otherwise. That knowledge gave Moon a sense of relief so strong it was almost dizzying, her ears ringing with it…

Ringing…

Singing…

Moon's wings folded serenely shut as her eyelids followed suit, and she plummeted down into the ocean far below.

- o -

Aya's breasts ached. Her throat did too, and her head, from the powerful song-spell it had taken to drag the alien princess out of the sky. Aya had followed the Lunarian and the dark one for hours, treading water stubbornly, shielding her aura carefully, listening to them talk about using the Lunarian as bait; swimming fast after them when they took off into the sky, panic and terror surging in her when she thought that they would leave and take with them the only reason for the slavers to return. Had the dark one waited only a few moments longer to leave the Lunarian, it would have been out of range of Aya's voice. As it was, Aya had screamed her throat bloody making sure her voice reached it.

The Lunarian dropped out of the sky, slamming into the water so hard Aya felt its consciousness stutter and darken. It fell deep into the water, surrounded by bubbles and white feathers, and by the time Aya dragged it back to the surface, it was unconscious. Aya began to hum to keep it that way. _Mother Goddess, please let this work._

She worked quickly, her own muscles exhausted and weak from the magic she'd used. She bound the Lunarian's wrists and ankles together behind its back with its own long yellow hair, arranging its limp wings at angles on either side of it to keep it floating face-up. Its shallow breaths hit Aya's arms as she worked and raised pebbles along her skin.

Aya wrenched at the wings to keep them in place, was less gentle than she could have been. The bedraggled white feathers filled her with an anger she could not explain. This alien creature who was supposed to save them all looked like a gull after a bad storm, matted feathers lying sleek against a too-small body. It was not the beautiful princess-savior Aya had imagined when she was a hatchling listening to stories of the Moon Princess, when she had pictured beauty and power as the Roans knew it: pearlescent scales and rounded breasts and solid tail.

Only the princess's aura was anything like what Aya had expected. Sinuous and vast, it twisted in Aya's senses like the kaleidoscopic beams of sunlight that sometimes made their way to the bottom of the ocean. It felt massive like the behemoths that lurked at its deepest depths, so large that only bits of them were glimpsed and never their entirety.

Aya kept her own aura curled over it as best she could, as she had so carefully done to Ishm'ayal's as they darted from the Chaos creatures back on Roa. The princess's did not curl into hers as Ishm'ayal's had but fluttered instead, like a cnidarian letting its tentacles drift in the current. Aya tried to cover them, shield them lest the dark one and the other Senshi sense it and come running to their princess's rescue before Aya was ready.

Only as darkness began to streak the sky did she begin to pull her aura back in, uncovering the Lunarian's so that the kidnappers might sense it and return. At the same time, she stopped humming the slumber-spell and sank beneath the water so that only her eyes remained above the surface.

The princess begin to stir, its wings twitching. The movement disturbed its balance, sent water lapping over its face, and it sputtered weakly, coughed. Aya began to hum again, and it stopped mid-cough, rigid. Aya's spell locked all its muscles save for the ones deep inside that kept its heart beating and lungs breathing and the ones that would allow it to speak. It was a tune her father had taught her, one she had never had opportunity to use before.

The princess's eyes opened slowly. They were silver in the rising moons' light. Aya hummed more loudly, unnerved by the Lunarian's resistance of her spell, tiny though it was. Without realizing it she began to circle it in the water, predatory.

The alien's eyes followed her with effort. "What have you done," it rasped.

Aya kept circling. "You were going to leave."

Its eyelids drifted shut again. It didn't say anything. Aya didn't, either. She closed her eyes, reached out for her people's minds, to begin drawing them to her. Angluuk and the others wouldn't be happy to find out what she had done, but they would not defy her. At the very edges of her perception, she thought she could sense something, an approaching shadow…

"People will die if I don't go."

Aya looked at the Lunarian. It hadn't opened its eyes again. Nor did Aya sense it struggling against her control. A ruse, to lower Aya's guard? Was it contacting its own reinforcements to come to it? No matter. She would welcome Senshi to help them fight the slavers once they came.

"I can't stay."

It seemed almost to be speaking to itself. Aya pretended this was the case, did not allow herself to think about what the alien was saying. She thought instead about her aching breasts, about the hatchling who should have had the milk in them. Her baby Ishm'ayal with his hands so small that they still curled around her finger when she stroked it down his tiny palm. He had only opened his eyes a few sun-cycles ago, a beautiful bruised blue like the water when a storm rages, had only begun to recognize her with a widening of those eyes and a curving of his gummy mouth a few days after that. There in their miserable refugee camp, she had felt so happy the first time his aura lit up in recognition of her voice. When it had reached out to hers, tiny and clumsy like his little hand. It had been like a gift directly from the Goddess, a reminder that not all was lost.

Was Ishm'ayal reaching out for her now? Stretching out and crying when he couldn't sense her? Would the slavers hit him for crying, would they think him too young for their trouble? Would they throw him out the airlock into space the way she had seen done to so many of her people on the other refugee ships?

She could not bear to think it. Her baby floating alone and cold in the dark like a piece of waste.

"I have to go."

Aya looked at the Lunarian. Its eyes were wide, and only then did Aya sense the thing pressing against the edges of her senses, closed and blurred and _black_, like something sweet that had rotted. Only then did Aya hear the pipes, a haunting melody drifting into her ears and deeper.

"I have to _go_!" But the Lunarian's eyelids were slipping shut, its wings lifting out of the water, beginning to flap.

Aya seized them. "No!" She clung to them, dug her fingers between the feathers as the Lunarian began to lift out of the water. Her tail thrashed as she forced herself to sing the words, imbuing them with every drop of power she had left. "Stay awake! Stay _awake_—!"

A massive shadow fell over them. Aya wrenched her head back to see a huge ship descending from the clouds, blocking the glowing moons. It was strangely shaped, garishly colored, and shadowy figures stood along its bow. Music and magic washed from them, making Aya's vision swim. She sang, screamed, harder, as the strings of magic that connected the flutes to the Lunarian princess glittered, thickened, drew it upward. Aya was high in the air now, stomach swooping crazily as she hung from the Lunarian's wing, making the princess wobble in the air as it tried to fly up to the ship.

Then the ship crashed down into the water. The huge wave it sent up slammed into Aya, tearing her from the Lunarian's wing. She plunged into the water in a flurry of bubbles and foam, her song cut off by the impact. Sleep rushed in, a dream of Ishm'ayal and coral and Ishmynos stroking her hair—

_Wake!_

She was yanked into cold air. Gasping, spluttering, gills spasming along her neck, she saw the dark one beside her. His eyes caught hers for an instant before he disappeared into a swirling black hole in the water beside them. Belatedly she realized she was singing, a shaky song that strengthened as she realized she was part of a chorus. Her people were shooting through the water toward her, wailing their fury as they encircled the ship in the water. Their voices cut raggedly into the notes of the pipes that were still playing, making Aya's consciousness strobe weirdly in and out between the remembered dream and what was before her. Twanging in the background, cacophonous and wrong, were dozens of familiar auras. The hatchlings.

A shadow swooped over her. She looked up to see the Senshi who had been with the princess aloft in the sky, the dark one hanging from her grip. They were bulleting toward the shadowy figures along the edge of the prow, the dark one's power protectively enfolding the Senshi. Then he was shouting something and disappearing, and as Aya watched, the Senshi's face went blank and her wings slowed, began to move in time with the flute music from the shadows on the boat.

Aya surged forward, began to sing a spell of release. Around her, the other began to follow, sensing the same auras Aya had. They bared their teeth, ululating the song until the air fairly shook with it. The Senshi's wings faltered.

Aya shrieked in her head, _Louder!_

The Senshi's face began to clear.

One of the flautists crouched. His face was hard and cruel, his flute spiked like a barbed, poisonous tail. He blew several sharp notes and threw something into the air. Shapes burst from what he had thrown, exploding into huge spheres that zoomed apart and raced down toward Aya and the others. "_Bonbon Babies_!"

Screams and giggles erupted.

- o –

One second Sapphire was there, the next he wasn't—and the next he was, his hands gripping Lanai's ankles again, blocking the hypnotic influence of the pipers lining the mysterious ship's bow. Lanai jerked back out of the free-fall she had plummeted into without Sapphire shielding her mind from the spell and flapped hard once, twice, pulling them back into the air above the ship.

Before she could ask where the hell he'd gone, he was shouting, "There!" and vanishing once more. She followed the direction he'd flung an arm toward and saw Sailor Moon alighting gracefully on the gondola's bow beside one of the flautists, her hair and wings dripping wet.

Sapphire dropped out of a void above her onto her, and that was the last thing Lanai saw before she was sucked into sleep and dream again. She came back to in a flurry of foam and coughing, a hoarse voice shouting in her ear. It took her a second to realize it was singing, another to realize she was in the water, kept afloat by a Roan's clutching arm. She twisted, and when the Roan's arm tightened around her neck, realized that it was as much a chokehold as a hold meant to keep up from drowning.

"_Up_!" sang the Roan harshly, winding her other arm around Lanai's waist to keep herself attached. It was Aya, Lanai realized suddenly, and at the same moment she rose up out of the water, flapping hard. The water was thick with noise—screams, shouts, singing, flute music, malicious laughter—and the water was thick with bodies, Roans thrashing and stabbing and tearing and being plucked out of the water by strange, obscene-looking Chaos creatures with spherical bodies and the painted-on faces of smiling human children. The creatures plucked the Roans out of the water and spun until they blurred, releasing the Roans so that they flew out with the centrifugal force and slammed into the water or the gondola's solid hull. Above them, on the gunwale, Sapphire fought one of the flautists, ducking and swinging and shouting something over the music.

Lanai didn't care about any of this, though she knew she should, and Aya didn't seem to, either. She was too busy chanting a ragged song of "To the ship! To the ship! Down!"

The gondola's deck was as thick with children as the water was with bodies. Okian colts and Centauran colts and other beings Lanai didn't even recognize, all of them smiling and blank-eyed and crushed together like bodies in a mass grave as they sang a song with unintelligible words. Huge tanks of water sloshed along the gunwales, and it was inside these that liquid dark eyes and pearly scales gleamed: the Roan hatchlings.

Above them all, sitting on the prow and swinging her legs, was Moon. She, too, smiled emptily and sang.

The closer they got, the louder the children's song, and Aya's began to weaken in Lanai's ear. Lanai considered throwing her off and going for Moon, but before she could, Aya made a sound, half of pain and half of triumph, and slid from Lanai's back. Lanai whirled immediately and dove for Moon.

Moon turned her head, facing Lanai straight-on, and held out a hand.

Lanai slammed into the mast. Something in her back crunched. Then she was being dragged backward by an invisible force, flipped over the bow. She flew backward into the water, and the music in her ears was suddenly deafening, all-consuming. Black dots closed in around her vision as Roans converged around her, churning water and thrashing tails and empty eyes…and sharp, gleaming teeth.

The last thing she saw above her was a glimpse of red and Sapphire's stricken eyes, and she tried to shout for him to go.

Then there was only pain.

- o -

There were four pipers, each balanced perfectly along the starboard gunwale. Two were dressed like clowns, the third's aura snarled like a rabid dog, and the fourth was a child, wide-eyed and frightened. He was white from head-to-toe and didn't remind Sapphire of Diamond at all.

Sapphire dropped out of his void directly onto the third. His was the melody that held the others together, continuing steadily as they crescendoed and decrescendoed, and thus the most logical target.

The boy danced backward out of Sapphire's way, his eyes glittering and mouth curving. Sharp canines glinted behind his lips. He blew a loud, harsh note and paused. He realized too late that it hadn't affected Sapphire; he didn't duck backward fast enough to avoid the slash of Sapphire's long crystal across his chest. Dark blood sprang out across his filmy white tunic.

"Damn you!" the boy hissed, and blew a series of sharp notes as he flipped backward out of Sapphire's range—only to back right into Sapphire's blade when Sapphire stepped out of a void behind him. He hissed and yanked forward, ducking and taking Sapphire's deeply buried crystal with him. Sapphire went with his momentum, only to be slammed backward. He went flying through the air, a crushing weight on his chest that crushed him against the opposite gunwale of the gondola. He opened his clenched eyes to see one of the huge ball-shaped creatures with the painted child's face inches from his own. It was making giggling noises as it ground him against the gunwale. Sapphire heard a snapping sound that might have been his ribs.

"Heh!" The piper dropped down beside them, smirking around his flute again. "How do you like my Bonbon Baby?"

Sapphire looked at him. The pain must be causing him to hear things, for he could have sworn that the man had just called the thing a "Bonbon Baby." He ignored this and forced his concentration to rally past the pain spasming through him with every breath. A void opened behind him, and he fell backward into it. The massive spherical creature went with him, bearing him down to the void's floor. Sapphire rolled in the split second before it began crushing him again and leapt out into another void, leaving the thing behind, wailing. He dropped back onto the gondola, glimpsed Lanai's wings in the water below him, spotted Sailor Moon on the prow a few meters away—

And crashed to his knees, rigid with pain. White exploded behind his eyes, seemed to pour out his ear. Above him, the piper grinned, pulled his bloody flute out of Sapphire's ear.

"Oops," he said.

Sapphire collapsed sideways, onto his knees, and then, when his knees wouldn't hold him, his face. From above him there was a shout that sounded like "Poupelin! You know we weren't—" but he couldn't hear, he couldn't hear, but their minds were still audible, he heard _not supposed to kill him, the princess dies if he does_, and it jerked him into motion, that reminder. He forced himself to roll, planting his hand on the deck and funneling the last of his concentration to the molecules there.

He saw Sailor Moon, kneeling blank-eyed among the equally blank children as they wrapped their arms around her, singing. Heard the mental cacophony of Lanai's mind screaming, the equally cacophonic sound of the Roans in some sort of warrior frenzy. Then he dropped into the void that opened under his fingers.

There, he managed to clamp a hand over his gushing ear before everything went black.

- o –

Aya slithered across the deck, under and around the feet of the dancing children, toward the tanks that pulsed with Roan auras. They were too blurred by the song and its magic for her to distinguish them, just a smear across her senses, and she dragged herself up the side of the first tank, clutching at its rim and looking jerkily around at the hatchlings thrashing their tails happily in it. She recognized Angluuk's daughter, and Kun'dyal's, but they did not recognize her, did not even focus on her. She grabbed their arms, slapped their tails, pinched their gills. "Where is Ishm'ayal? Listen to me! Wake up! Where is Ishm'ayal, where is he?"

But they didn't register her, didn't even blink or stop singing.

She struggled to the next tank, and then the next, each time recognizing the hatchlings there but never her baby. Her gills gasped and her tail muscles burned, and she had to stop before the next tank, had to press her hand against the glass and sob with exhaustion and fear. She was still singing, a tiny breath of song that she kept pushing out of her dry mouth as the flute music chewed at her, nibbled bloody holes in her awareness.

She pressed her forehead to the glass, trying to sing louder. Finally forced her eyes open, only to see bruised blue ones staring back at her.

A cry tore from her.

Because he's dead. His beautiful eyes bugging from his eye sockets, unfocused, and his bloated tongue protruding from his tiny blue lips and his gills limp and pale where blood is no longer circulating to them because he must have been dead here at the bottom of the tank for hours, kept from bobbing to the surface by the other hatchlings' happily thrashing tails.

A Bonbon Baby plucked her up then, dragged her up screaming from where she lay clawing at the glass, clawing for her baby. She screamed into it, gouged her fingers into it, slammed her tail against it again and again. It spun and spun and spun and flung her into the water, and when she lunged back up out of it, another Bonbon Baby smashed into her, and then another. Something else grabbed her by the tail and hurled her into the side of the gondola. She hit hard and tumbled back into the water nearly as hard, her vision blacking out. When she made it back to the surface, snarling and sobbing, the gondola was lifting up out of the water.

"Ishm'ayal." She thrashed after it. "_Ishm'ayal_!"

There was a flash, a last piercing note of music.

Then the gondola was gone.

- o -

The hazy dawn light the next morning illuminated a floating graveyard of bodies, rising and falling on the waves. Carrion birds circled above it.

The serrated hunger in their thoughts stung Aya awake. Her eyelids opened, pulling at dried blood and pulped flesh, and she stared uncomprehendingly at the layer of flies on the raw red driftwood upon which her head and arms rested.

Then she moved her throbbing head a fraction and saw a scratched tiara and a bloody eye socket, a face savaged by sharp teeth, a jugular gaping open beneath it.

Aya wrenched back, sobbing in the water. The Senshi's stomach armor came with her, a solid plate with gobs of flesh still clinging to the ribs protruding from its sides. The flies buzzed in annoyance at the movement, alighting from the bloated corpse. Then they settled again along the Senshi's now-exposed innards.

Aya turned her head, cheek digging into the rough armor as she dry-heaved, too weak to slide off it into the flesh-fouled water. She didn't know for how much longer she drifted there, feverish and weak, before something gleamed at the top of her vision. She craned her head, fresh waves of nausea crashing over her at the movement.

A woman was walking across the water toward her. Outlined by the rising sun behind her, she was a shadow that glowed, gold and tall and beautiful.

"Goddess," Aya whispered.

The Goddess stopped before her, knelt gently. "_You have lost everything, Aya_." Her voice reverberated with many voices, and Aya closed her eyes against its weight. Against the memory of her baby, gone. The soul that the Goddess had given her to nurture and protect, her Ishm'ayal.

"_You are not the first mother to fail her child, Aya_," the Goddess said quietly. "_Nor will you be the last_."

Aya choked on blood. Slithered gracelessly to touch the Goddess's feet with trembling fingers, with blood-caked lips. _Anything, Mother Goddess—I will do anything, if only—_

"_Anything_?"

_Anything._

The Goddess touched Aya's elbow. Slid her fingers down to Aya's wrist, stilling the weak pulse that struggled there. Everything stopped for a long, endless moment.

Then a burning pressure. Aya's blood roaring, thundering so hard she would surely burst. She would surely explode, surely die—

Gold light exploded outward.

When it faded, Sailor Galaxia smiled. "Rise, Sailor Aluminum Siren."


	7. Chapter 7

**A/N****:** Long wait for a short update. Sorry, guys. Next time will make up for it!

Continued thanks to Jade for being amazing, and to you guys for reading.

**Disclaimer**: I do not own Sailor Moon or any proper nouns. Geography and culture will be swallowed, masticated, and regurgitated without regard to accuracy.

**Date:** 12.3.12

**Warnings: **Language

- o -

**Subject to Change**

Season 3

Chapter Seven: Asanuma

- o -

From Hokkaido they caught a flight to Hong Kong, and from there they would fly to Istanbul to catch a connecting flight to Paris. There, they had found by Googling Asanuma's name, they would find the celebrated young artist Asanuma Itto, whose most recent exhibition would be opening in the 3rd Arrondissement that very night.

Motoki didn't have a passport, but Mikai procured one for him somehow, at such short notice that Ami wondered, first, what contacts he had and how he had ever gotten mixed up with whomever they were, and second, how much it had cost. She had discovered that she had a decent sum of various currencies stashed in her SubSpace pocket along with a few sets of credit cards under various names that Mercury had probably obtained at the same time she got the ones for Rei. It had been so long, though—_four years_; it still shocked her every time she realized it anew—that a few of them were already almost expired, and she was almost afraid to use them. Despite all she had done, she had never done anything illegal before—not when she was her, when she was _Ami_, anyways—as silly a thing as that might be to dwell on.

But if Ami was uncomfortable with Mikai shelling out money on their "quest," Motoki seemed even more so; he fumbled with the passport when Mikai handed it to him, looking dismayed and mumbling something apologetic about paying Mikai back. Mikai waved it off ("Business expenses, Motoki, you wouldn't have needed this if we weren't dragging you across the planet").

Ami hated seeing Motoki look so uncomfortable, plucking at the worn cuffs of his windbreaker and hunching his shoulders in his seat as though to take up as little space as possible. In her memories, he had always seemed like the most confident person she knew, tall and strong, never afraid to smile at someone or crouch and ask a child why they were crying or get between a middle school boy and the kid he was bullying. She'd never spoken to him much, when she was Ami, knowing that their social strata were so far apart they might have been from different planets—ha—but once, when Rei and Serena had fought with each other at the arcade and flounced away, leaving Ami anxious and uncertain in their booth, Motoki had come over and brought her a new soda and told her seriously that Rei and Serena would have made up with each other again by the next day and don't worry about it, okay, Mizuno-san?

She hadn't even known he'd known her name, then.

Now their positions felt reversed, almost, and she wanted so badly to make him feel better the way he had her that it was almost like a knot of hunger in her stomach. But she didn't have the first idea of how, didn't have a "Things will be okay tomorrow" to offer him because it wasn't the truth and even if she said it with conviction he would just look at her and agree aloud but not believe it. She didn't have that magical power Serena had, of saying things with so much determination and fire behind them that they came true.

The plane to Paris began to accelerate down the runway. On Ami's other side, Mikai was smacking gum loudly, two pieces for each side of his mouth, to counter the takeoff's pressure on his Eustachian tubes. The smell of cinnamon was almost overwhelming, making her wrinkle her nose. He smirked at her.

She looked away. "Motoki-san?"

Motoki looked over, smiling. So did Mikai, hands pausing where they had been lifting earbuds to his ears.

"I…do you like jellybeans?" she blurted out, and immediately turned red. Even Serena would not have asked such a random question.

But Motoki didn't laugh. He thought over the question. "I don't really," he said after a moment. "They have too many weird flavors. I'd rather know what I'm putting in my mouth is going to taste like." He shifted, relaxing his shoulders slightly. "What about you?"

Ami had to think to come up with an answer. She had never really eaten them—her mother never bought her candy growing up, and Serena, who had introduced Ami to most of the candy she'd ever tasted in her life, had liked chocolate more than anything else. "I think I would," she said slowly. "I prefer fruity tastes to chocolate ones."

Motoki smiled. "At least then you can pretend it's healthy, right?"

"Chocolate is healthy," Ami protested. "It contains flavonoids that act as antioxidants—" She stopped, flushing. "Sorry."

Motoki was smiling wider now, and it actually looked real instead of polite. "It's okay. Keep going, it's interesting."

"That was all, really. Just that antioxidants are thought to lower risks of cancer. And they're being investigated to treat Parkinson's and Alzheimer's diseases."

"I should tell my patients that," Motoki said in interest. "A lot of them really miss eating chocolate, and maybe that would convince the charge nurses to let them have some."

"Well, it would have to be carefully considered according to their individual dietary requirements… Um. I'm babbling. Sorry."

He smiled at her. "It's okay. You're trying to distract yourself."

"I—what?"

Motoki shrugged, uncertainty creeping back into his expression. "I just figured—it seems like you're a nervous flyer? I thought you wanted to talk to keep your mind off of it."

"Oh. I." Ami felt stupid that while she was trying to make Motoki feel better he thought he'd been doing the same thing for her. But she found herself smiling. "I—yes. Thank you."

-o-

Upon their arrival at Paris-Charles de Gaulle Airport, Motoki tried again to call the number he had for Asanuma as they were pushed out in the gush of passengers hurrying toward the baggage carrel. To hear above their noise and the boarding calls being relayed over the intercom in fluid French, he had the phone speaker turned to its highest volume, and Mikai, pressed uncomfortably close to him by the crowd, heard the disappointing message: "We're sorry. The number you have called is no longer in service."

"Ah, well," Mikai said, accepting his cell phone back from Motoki. Motoki's couldn't make international calls. "We'll just have to do this the hard way, I guess."

"Can't Ami-san's computer just—?" Motoki began, but Ami had disappeared.

Mikai spun around, pulse already quickening as he remembered the little that Mercury and Ami had told him about the High Senshi. But he quickly found the dark blue hair a few meters behind them, stopped near the wall, and he struggled his way back through the crowd, ignoring the muttered French that sounded like insults from the people his duffel bag thumped into along the way.

"You do know how short and difficult to see in a crowd you are, right?" he said when he caught up to her, standing close to her shoulder as people pushed past them.

Ami glanced up over her shoulder at him and tilted her head forward, indicating the series of movie-poster-sized advertisements in front of which she had stopped. Next to some circus poster proclaiming, _Coming Soon to dazzle the City of Light!_, was a poster advertising Asanuma Ittou's _cequichange_ exhibition at Musée Carnavalet.

"Wow," said Motoki, who had caught up. "That's a big deal, isn't it? That he's famous enough to have a poster in the airport?"

"Apparently," Mikai said, taking a picture of the poster with his phone and checking that the phone number to purchase tickets to the opening gala was visible in the photo. "All right. Back into the fray, people."

They hadn't checked any of their luggage—Motoki and Mikai just had a duffel bag each, and Ami didn't have any luggage at all—so they didn't stop at the baggage carrel. They headed for the metro line instead, Mikai pulling out his phone and then his wallet to hand Ami a credit card so she could buy them Navigo passes. But Ami was already heading for the ticket dispensers, reaching into her own pocket—her wicked awesome _Subspace_ pocket, Mikai thought with the same little thrill of curiosity that kept hitting him whenever he watched her.

"Go with Ami?" he said to Motoki as he flipped open his phone. He handed him the handful of euros and his credit card just in case.

Motoki took the credit card and handful of euros Mikai handed him ("Just in case," Mikai said), hefted his duffel bag and joined Ami at the end of the line. She glanced up at him, and Motoki was reminded yet again of how small she was, her eyes not even up to her collarbone. He kept forgetting, because she was so knowing and reassuring, like someone older and bigger than she was. Although, he supposed, he really needed to remember that she _was _much older than she looked. At least four normal years older, and about a thousand extra years on top of that, if the story they had told him was true...which he was sort of banking on, considering he'd quit his job and hopped a plane with them with a most-likely-fake passport.

Oh, God. What had he gotten himself into?

"You left Mikai?"

Motoki blinked again. "Um. He's back there?" He pointed over his shoulder.

Ami followed his finger to where Mikai was leaning against a wall, speaking into his cell phone. She looked concerned. "I don't want you two left alone."

Motoki grinned a little. "I think Mikai felt the same thing about you."

That made Ami frown, the closest expression to annoyance he had seen her make. "Mikai-san needs to start worrying about himself for once," she muttered.

Motoki decided to sidestep that conversational Charybdis, aimed for Scylla instead. "You think we're in danger _here_? From-" He lowered his voice, looked around, "the High Senshi?"

Ami cast him a sharp look. He had overheard her telling Mikai that she didn't think the High Senshi would have left Darien-the freaking _prince_ of the _planet_, he still didn't quite believe it-unwatched after her princess left Earth, that they wouldn't want to risk Darien regaining his memories and joining the princess. Since getting Darien to recover his memories and go after the princess was exactly what Ami was trying to do, it made sense that any High Senshi who had been left behind would be looking for them to stop them by any means necessary.

If they weren't already, that is.

Crap. How many more times could that _Oh God, I'm actually risking my life here_ realization slap him in the face?

"I had hoped so," Ami said after a moment. "But this feels different. Darker."

At least once more, apparently. Motoki swallowed. "Dark like...that Chaos thing?"

The ticket line moved forward a spot. "I'm not sure."

Motoki was quiet as they waited for their turn in line and as Ami purchased them three Navigo passes. He followed her back to Mikai, who was still on his phone when they reached him, speaking what sounded like pretty mangled French. Ami handed the passes to Motoki and reached into her pocket. Mikai watched her hand disappear, then leaned down and forward slightly as she reached for his face. She touched his ear and he bolted straight, flinching with a cry and exclaiming, "_ Avertir un mec avant de lui donner un wet willy, Ami_!"

Motoki gaped. "Did he just...?"

Ami put a tiny gleaming thing that looked like a frozen raindrop into his hand. She tapped her ear, and he obeyed, pressing the small device inside like he would an earplug. He could see now why Mikai had flinched; it burned like a piece of dry ice. Just as quickly, though, the icy-hot sensation faded, and the incomprehensible conversations and newscasts around him became snatches of comprehensible ones.

"-_told_ you not to forget the charger-"

"-declared between Syria and neighboring-"

"Quick, if we get to the baggage carrel before-"

"-news today of another earthquake in Europe-"

"Mom, I'm staaaarving-"

He looked at Ami in astonishment. "What is this?"

Ami smiled at his surprise, a little shyly and a little proudly. "A translation device."

"Wow," Motoki breathed, except, weirdly overlaid in his ears, he heard, "_Formidable_," and damn, he just had to shake his head in wonder at that.

Mikai said, "_Merci_!" and snapped his phone shut just then, looking over at them. He pointed one finger at his ear and the other at Ami. "We're discussing this later," he told her, then waved his phone. "All right! I have just obtained tickets to the opening gala for Asanuma Itto's _cequichange_ exhibit tonight. Which leaves us about-" He checked his watch, "four hours to find ourselves some black-tie attire."

Ami's smile vanished.

- o -

"I don't really see that this is necessary," Ami said as they walked up to the intimidating-looking department store Mikai had brought up with the MapQuest app on his phone. "We could just as easily get to him before or after the function. I could get us into his place of residence so that we would be there waiting for him."

"Yeah, and once he freaked out as finding a bunch of weirdos in his apartment you'd ice his arms together, right?" Mikai looked over at Motoki, lowered his voice. "That's what she did to me when she showed up randomly in _my_ house."

Ami glared at him. "If Asanuma is anything like I remember him, what you call 'weirdness' will not faze him. And at any rate, he knows both of you."

"Uh," said Motoki. "To be fair, I haven't talked to him in a long time."

"And when I met him I was still a woman," Mikai said.

Ami gave him an _I will shrivel your testicles with the sheer force of my disdain_ look. And Motoki looked at him in consternation, as though trying to figure out if he was for real. "I don't remember that..?"

"Because your memories were stolen," Mikai told him. "Okay, no, I'm lying. But look. Ami. We already tried the creeper approach, okay? With poor Motoki. And look how well that turned out."

"He's with us now, isn't he?" Ami said waspishly.

"Yeah, because we bribed him. Also, his life sucked so hard already that coming to risk his life with us was actually an improvement."

Motoki opened his mouth to protest this unrosy summary of his life, then closed it as he had to concede it was mostly true.

Mikai took a step closer to Ami. "Don't think I don't know what this reluctance is all about, Fearless Leader." He grinned. "You're just nervous about dressing up."

Ami glowered at the sidewalk. "That's not it. I'm thinking purely of strategy."

"We can help you pick something out," Mikai offered. "I'm thinking strapless for her, Motoki, what do you think?"

"I think you're being a jerk," Motoki said honestly. "Like a nine-year-old with a crush."

Ami turned pink, mumbled something, and headed up the steps, disappearing through the store's double doors.

"Remember, ruffles accentuate the bust!" Mikai shouted after her, and all of a sudden there was a crackling sound and his eyelashes were covered in icicles. He blinked and laughed.

Motoki shook his head. "I also think you're a masochist."

Mikai laughed again. "I think you're right."

Motoki shook his head again, smiling, but then they were pushing through the doors and into the men's formalwear section, and nerves began to crawl through his stomach. After a few minutes of wandering through racks of suits he couldn't have afforded even on two of his salaries, he cleared his throat.

"You know, you probably don't need me to go."

Mikai groaned. "What is this, did Ami infect you with her bashful bacteria? You have to come, we're counting on you to guilt Asanuma into coming with us with those puppy dog eyes of yours."

Motoki didn't say anything. He was nervous enough about seeing his best friend again for the first time in so long, didn't want to meet him in some fancy party where he wouldn't know how to hold a fork or dance a waltz or whatever. And he really didn't want to do it in an obviously cheap, rented tux, but there was no way he could afford one of these, and he didn't want Mikai to pay for one. He must have mumbled to something that effect, because Mikai's face and voice went abruptly gentle.

"Motoki. If this was a business function for your place of employment, wouldn't your employer give you a wardrobe allowance?"

Motoki had never had a job that involved business functions, so he really had no idea. He hazarded an "I guess?"

Mikai gripped his shoulder. "The answer is yes. So just think of me as the employer and this as your wardrobe allowance, okay? Okay." He released Motoki.

"But you're not my employer," Motoki said, feeling that a little more resistance was necessary in order to be courteous.

Mikai raised an eyebrow. "Aren't I? I need something done and I offered to pay you to do it. Sounds like an employer to me. Would you have done this if you weren't being paid?"

Motoki wasn't sure if he would be lying if he said yes. Mikai seemed to read this in his eyes.

"Look," he said quietly, losing the jovial, older-than-you smile he'd been sporting since the first time Motoki met him. "I just want to save my friend. For that we need Asanuma, and Asanuma's not going to talk to me, or Ami. So we need you. Let me buy you the tux."

He strode forward without waiting for Motoki to answer, plucked up a few sets of jackets and blazers and shoved Motoki into a dressing area with them. Motoki obediently pulled each one on, showing them to Mikai for approval, but when they had both picked their ensembles and were waiting for the store attendant to ring them up, he finally spoke.

"I don't want to shoot this all down," he said, "but you know, right? Asanuma and Darien weren't the bosom buddies Ami seems to think they were."

Mikai said nothing, just watched Motoki and waited for him to continue. Motoki cleared his throat a little, shoved a hand in his hair. "Did you ever watch that show Naruto?" he said, not really expecting an affirmative answer.

"Did I watch Naruto?" Mikai repeated in a tone of the utmost offense." Of _course_ I watched Naruto, it's only one of the best anime ever."

"Oh," said Motoki. His estimation of Mikai went up a notch. "Well, I always used to think they were a lot like Sasuke and Naruto. Like, Darien was always so perfect, and Asanuma was always racing after him trying to keep up or do it better…and he never really could." He smiled sadly. "But I don't think that was what really bothered Numa. I think it was that Darien never seemed to really notice him. No matter how much better he got at calc, at chemistry, at track even, he just wasn't on Darien's radar."

He met Mikai's eyes. "I think for Darien, Numa and I were just part of the scenery," he said honestly. "I think you're going to be disappointed when you see just how little influence we have on him."

- o -

They hadn't even reached the party yet, and Ami was already regretting the modest cardigan set she'd gotten. While they were at Printemps, a part of her had wondered what Mercury would buy, had pictured either a severe blue pantsuit with pearls or an absolutely shameless dress, something tight and sheer and fearless. She'd taken the coward's route out, grabbed a soft pink, pearl-buttoned cardigan with a matching dress the filmy skirt of which swished around her knees. It had looked pretty in the changing room mirror, but she looked like a twelve-year-old amid the plunging necklines and bared backs of the other women waiting in line to show their invitations. She pretended she didn't notice the disparity, kept her eyes trained on the head of the line where two men in suits were checking names on a list.

"Down, Fido," Mikai said to her, which made Motoki frown at him and smile reassuringly at Ami. He seemed to sense her unease, which made her feel slightly comforted but also annoyed; she knew so much, could remember attending parties on Proxima and Alpha Centauri, dancing with earls and kings, and yet here she was feeling like a clumsy oaf among a bunch of Terrans?

But that hadn't actually been her, had it? Did it matter that she could remember the steps to a Baalteranian waltz if she had never actually danced it? _She_ had never been to parties with royalty, had never danced with crown princes and kings. The closest thing to a party she had ever been to was that mixer at her boarding school, and she'd spent the night leaning against the wall with a plastic cup of punch.

Yet that life felt as distant and separate from her as her-Mercury's-life as a princess did. She had been a different person in both; she couldn't imagine trailing after the cruel girls she'd clung to in middle school like a lost puppy now, just as she couldn't imagine walking up to a king as she could recall doing a thousand years ago and trailing an ice-filmed finger up his arm in invitation to dance.

"Our turn!" Mikai put a hand to the small of her back as the couple in front of them were waved past the podium where two men waited with the guest list. "Kentaro, party of three," he said to them.

The mustached man flipped to the back of the book, looking at a page of late additions. "Yes, of course, _Madame et Messieurs_, welcome. Please enter."

_Madame_? Ami thought, earlier contemplation pushed momentarily aside. She certainly didn't look old enough to be called that because of her age, regardless of her matronly attire. What...oh. That half sneaky, half pleased look on Mikai's face as they swept inside probably had something to do with it.

Motoki looked equally puzzled. "Did you say she was your _wife_?" he said, looking slightly aghast and a lot protective as he flanked Ami.

Mikai rolled his eyes. "Do let's be adults here, Motoki. What does it matter if complete strangers in Paris think we're married?"

"Exactly," Motoki muttered. "What does it matter?"

Ami pretended not to have heard any of this by peering around the large room instead, ignoring the heat climbing up her neck. It wasn't as easy to spot Asanuma's blond hair here as it would have been back home; here, there were light-haired people all over the place, women with glamorous waves and luxurious curls and strappy, backless dresses, and insecurity began to chew at her again. For a moment, she wished for Serena's Luna Pen, then remembered its owner, remembered what she was here for. Not to impress a bunch of people she didn't know, or Motoki or Asanuma, or even Mikai.

She was here for Serena.

She slipped past where Mikai had fallen into conversation with one of the glittering women and Motoki was politely refusing champagne from a passing waiter. The press of people was warm and thick with perfume and cologne, and smooth bare shoulder and silken tuxedos brushed against her as she passed. She ignored them all, stretching her senses out, ignoring the way she felt like a child among them and forcing herself to feel like a warrior instead, like Mercury would have felt if she were walking among them. Their auras were alternately fizzy and flat, none of them like Mikai's or Motoki's...

There. Ami's attention snapped around fast as whiplash, senses zooming in on the writhing dark aura she felt. As her eyes caught up with her senses, her stomach sank. The fair-haired man the aura belonged to was in a close, intent conversation with another man whose curly blond hair was shorter than Ami remembered it but unmistakable all the same.

The man who was not Asanuma lifted his eyes behind pretentious black glasses and looked straight at Ami. For a moment, his eyes went impossibly long and curved, like the painted-on face of a clown. Then he was smiling at Asanuma again, saying something and clasping the other man's shoulder before walking away.

_Follow me,_ his posture said, clear as if he'd beamed it straight into Ami's nerves. She felt herself jerking forward, caught herself less instantly than she would have liked, less instantly than Mercury would have, and moved toward Asanuma instead. The man, in his white-and-black checkered suit, paused and made a _moue_ over his shoulder at her, then shrugged and disappeared into the crowd.

Ami's muscles went slack all at once, as if she was a puppet the strings of which had just been cut, and she stood there for a moment regaining her breath. _What_ had that thing been? An alien, that was clear, but not one she recognized from her own memories or Mercury's, and certainly not a High Senshi. Should she have followed it?

Not on its terms, not when it had so clearly wanted her to, she told herself, and turned to find Asanuma again. His bright hair had vanished, but she could still sense him, somewhere outside, and she followed his aura to a pair of double doors half hidden by a set of potted plants. She shoved through them onto a balcony—

Only to realize Asanuma was occupied. He wasn't alone; there was another woman with him now, a dark-haired one with her arms knotted around his neck, and for a single moment, Ami thought with shock and joy, _Rei_.

Except it wasn't Rei, she realized with almost as much shock a second later. It was only someone who had dark hair like Rei, who made an embarrassingly loud moan Rei would have sooner died than made when Asanuma moved his attention to her neck, closing his mouth around the bare skin. The woman made a sound and attacked his neck in fevered reciprocity. Asanuma let her, opening his eyes lazily—and looking right at Ami.

Instead of starting and pulling away from the woman, he merely grinned at Ami, running a hand down the woman's waist. "Sorry, sweetheart, you're too young to join in the fun. Come back in a few years."

Dislike—hatred, even—flashed through Ami. It tasted like ice so cold it burned, like Mercury, as though Ami was her or she was Ami or they were each other; it didn't matter, because they both felt the same hissing contempt, the same boiling desire to _force _the memories into this Terran to make him remember Rei and love her.

How long she stood there staring at him she didn't know. Asanuma just stared back,

eyes growing less and less desire-darkened, until he finally huffed out a sigh and pulled away from the woman, who twisted around to glare at Ami.

"All right. You want an autograph or something? You're persistent, I'll give you that much. I admire persistence…to an extent." Asanuma snaked an arm around Ami's shoulders. Wine-scented breath hit her face. She stiffened as he led her inside, then went still altogether when a painting caught her eye. Asanuma was yanked to a stop as well, and he glanced down at her with annoyance. Then he followed her gaze to the painting of a bloodied, broken glass goblet.

"Oh, that old thing." He wiggled his fingers in dismissal. "It's a piece from my school days."

Ami knew; she had seen it in Pluto's mirror.

"It fit the whole "revolution" theme, you know, _cequichange_, and my agent wanted it up to show my progress from then to now—but really it's too overwrought for me to be proud of," Asanuma said contemptuously. "Gauche. I was a different person when I painted it, not really myself yet, you know?"

"But think, if you hadn't done immature work like that before, you wouldn't have grown into your current style." Ami turned to see Mikai stepping up behind them, hands carelessly in his pockets. "It's like a sand castle, right? You need all the unimpressive stuff as a foundation before you can build up to the fragile pretty bits."

Dislike sharpened Asanuma's eyes. With the arm that wasn't over Ami's shoulders, he lifted a flute of champagne from another passing waiter and put it to his lips. "Funny," he said in a tone that indicated it was anything but, "I don't think we've met."

"Actually, we have." Mikai came closer, extending a hand. "Mikai Kentaro. I'm a friend of Darien Shields. We met at your graduation."

Asanuma's eyes sharpened. "Ah. I didn't recognize you without green hair."

"I prefer to think I wasn't really _myself_ yet then, you know?" Mikai said, his eyes twinkling. Ami couldn't help a smile.

Asanuma watched the exchange, pulling away to look down at her properly but not removing his arm. "And I suppose we've met as well?"

Ami hesitated for a moment. "Not really. But I know Rei Hino. I think you knew her? She went to TA Girls' Academy in Minato-chou."

Asanuma didn't bat a lash. "Don't think I did."

She must not have managed to completely hide her disappointment for Rei, as he smiled at her condescendingly. "Sorry, sweetheart. I had a lot of admirers back then, too. I can't remember all their names."

"Asanuma," came a voice from behind them. "You could at least wait for the second date before showing a girl what a douche bag you are."

Asanuma spun around, releasing Ami. His eyes were wide. "Motoki Furuhata!" He strode forward, clamping the taller man into a hug, careful not to spill his champagne. "God_damn_, man, it's been years!"

Motoki nodded. "You're doing…" He looked around. "Really well."

Asanuma was nodding almost stupidly, grinning. "Man, this is such a surprise! I didn't know you'd be here! Did my people send you an invite?"

If the fact that they hadn't, or that Asanuma hadn't asked "his people" to invite Motoki, bothered the taller man, he didn't show it. "Could we talk to you, Numa? In private?"

Asanuma's eyes swept back over Ami and Mikai. His wide grin faded, his expression becoming more guarded and condescending again. "I suppose so," he said carelessly, and drained the last of his drink in a single gulp. He set it down on a glass display containing a sculpture, plucked up a fresh flute, and waved a hand toward the balcony again. "After you."

They filed outside, Mikai and Ami going first to let Motoki stay closer to Asanuma. Ami cast Mikai a look, wondering if they should leave and let Motoki do his thing, but he just shrugged and put a hand to the small of her back, barely touching, as they moved to the side.

Motoki, meanwhile, had cast a glance at Ami, not sure if he should explain it all—she was the one who actually remembered (or claimed to) what they were and what had happened, after all. But her uncertain expression reminded him that this was the reason they had brought him in the first place: They thought Motoki would be better able than them to convince Asanuma and Darien that their story was true.

He had warned Mikai how unlikely that might be, though, and the Asanuma now leaning his elbows against the railing and smirking expectantly at Motoki only made him feel even more strongly that he would fail to convince them. The Asanuma he had known wouldn't have leaned back casually like this one was; he would have been bouncing around Motoki, telling him to spit it out already, Toki, God, make a guy die of suspense why don't you, hey, how do you think this tux would look in neon green?

But that Asanuma had begun to become someone else even before graduation, as he grew more and more terse toward Darien and spent less time at the arcade. Perhaps the Asanuma Motoki remembered was even more of a vanished entity than the Asanuma that Ami and Mikai sought. Perhaps those postcards with their _wish you were here_s that had come those first few months hadn't been sincere so much as awkward, falling back on clichéd phrases.

"You know, it's nice to see that some things don't change," Asanuma said in amusement. He took a sip from his glass. "Still as awkward as ever, huh, Toki?"

"I have to show you something," Motoki blurted out.

Asanuma's alcohol-glazed gaze sharpened slightly.

"We're…" Motoki remembered how Mikai had transformed in front of him. "Remember that show you used to watch with Unazuki sometimes? _Magic Knight Rayearth_?"

Asanuma was wearing that fake, contemptuous smile again. "Uh, I never watched that show, Motoki…"

Motoki sighed, mentally rolling his eyes. "No, sorry, I must have remembered wrong. But you knew about it, right?" Not giving Asanuma time to answer, since it was pointless—Asanuma _had _watched _MKR_, religiously—he went on, "We're kind of like them. Okay? Watch."

He transformed, not as flashily as Mikai had, but with a few sparks. His eyes stayed on Asanuma's the whole time, watched how Asanuma's eyes briefly narrowed, measuring, then went back to the glass in his hand. He took a swallow of it, looked amused, and said, "An impromptu magic show? Is that what you're doing these days? I thought you were some professional old people babysitter or something."

Motoki felt Ami stir behind him, peripherally, beyond the sting of hurt. He held out a hand, not looking away from Asanuma, to indicate it was okay. "Medical aide, actually," he said quietly, as if it made any difference. He suddenly didn't want Asanuma to come with them, didn't want to have to deal with the knowledge of what his friend had thought of him all this time, but he continued doggedly, "You can do this, too. I know how crazy it sounds, believe me, but we're actually these, er, planetary warrior people."

He could practically feel Mikai and Ami's winces, hurried to fix it. "We were part of a team of them when we all lived in Tokyo, but this set of alien warriors came and took away our memories of it, and we all split up, and..."

And God, he really should have rehearsed this beforehand, or brought cue cards or something, because he was sounding like the plot summary of a really bad season of _Super Sentai_ or something. And he needs to do something, _something_, to fix this, and it's right there in his brain, right there on the very top, _whatever you do, do not mention Darien, not yet, _so of course the first thing that pops out of his mouth is "Darien needs our help."

A moment, and then,

"Of course," Asanuma said, his face bitter and ugly, "_of course_ this is about Darien. I should've known you wouldn't've come just to see me."

"Numa," Motoki began, but Asanuma's face was already shuttered over. And Motoki knew it was no use, knew there was no way they were getting through to him now, if ever. He turned to tell Ami and Mikai that their only chance at this point was to come back later, but Ami had that angry determined look on her face again. She stepped forward and began to explain the whole insane story herself with impressive terms like "a form of forced retrograde amnesia perpetrated by a reactionary faction of the galactic peacekeeping force, the High Senshi," and "the leader of a consortium of celestial governments bound by the Treaty of Zero Sagittarius," and even demonstrated her own powers to Asanuma as proof. But Motoki could see from Asanuma's glazed, narrowed eyes that even if he was hearing it, he wasn't _hearing_ it, he was just letting out angry little snorts, contemptuous ones, and when Ami was finally done he turned to Motoki, eyes cutting like a serrated knife.

"I don't know what kind of drugs you're on," he drawled out, paused and blinked to keep his eyes on Motoki's, "but I bet they're not legal." He paused, swayed. Motoki frowned, taking a step forward, ready to steady him if he needed it. Asanuma blinked and glared at him, said in a threatening tone that didn't really match his words: "I'm going to call you a cab so you can go sleep it off."

"Numa," Motoki said desperately, "even if we were on drugs, how does that explain how we can do this?" He motioned at his and Ami's hands, crackling with sparks and icicles, respectively.

"Because _I_ am so fucking plastered it's not even funny." Asanuma held his drink up to his eyes, squinted and swirled it. "I think Xeno must've put something in this. My suggestibility right now is like negative five." He giggled, high-pitched and strained. Then the giggle became a sigh, and then his brows furrowed. He looked at Motoki, seemed suddenly angry. "But dude. Even if it was true. Why the fuck would I leave all this to come with you?"

Motoki looked away. Ami watched him, felt her face crease with anger. "Because he's your _friend_."

"Friend?" Asanuma regarded Motoki a beat longer, then looked at Ami. "I haven't talked to Darien Shields in years. And even when I did, he wouldn't recognize friendship if it bit him in the ass. He doesn't believe in it." His eyes slide back to Motoki, and they were clearer, suddenly, than they'd been all night. "But Toki…we _are_ friends. So let me help you. I'll find you somewhere to come down, man, and tomorrow I can hook you up with a job somewhere—I know tons of chefs in the city, they'll take you on if I ask a favor."

Ami held her breath. The chance to work with Parisian chefs—that had to be a dream come true for Motoki. Better than the alternative they had offered: going out into the galaxy to be killed.

But Motoki was shaking his head. "Thanks, Numa, but no thanks."

"Toki—"

"Maybe Darien didn't believe in friendship," Motoki said over Asanuma. "But this is my chance to show him it does exist." His gaze, tired and sad, fell to Ami and Mikai. "Let's go."

There was another beat of silence as he followed them back into the gallery. Then Asanuma called after them, "You'll regret this, Toki!"

Motoki looked back, his hand braced on the doorjamb. Asanuma stood with his glass at his lips, smiling at him, half seductive, half vindictive, his eyes all anger. "I won't make this offer again!"

Maybe Motoki had been wrong. Maybe Asanuma was Sasuke, not Naruto. Or maybe, he thought even more sadly, turning away from his best friend, life wasn't simple enough to be distilled to _Shonen Jump_ plots anymore.

- o -

_ Rini has buried Serena's feet under a foot-high pile of sand. The intention was to bury all of her legs, and make the sand look like a mermaid's tail, but on her third trip down to the water to get more wet sand, she stopped to help a group of kids decorate their sandcastle with seashells, and now they're all on their hands and knees digging a moat around it, Rini's bucket forgotten in the sand. Serena doesn't mind, has taken the opportunity to recline back on the Hello Kitty towel Motoki gave Rini for her birthday a few weeks ago and enjoy the feel of the the breeze combing through her hair. _

_ When it gets a little more intimate, swirling in that sensitive spot behind her ear and teasing across her collarbone, the back of her neck, she doesn't sit up or take the arm from over her eyes, just smiles. And pushes her foot out of the pile of sand to where she senses him, finding his wet leg with her toes and running the inside of her foot up his calf._

_ "Careful, Shields," she says. "Don't start what you can't finish."_

_ He settles beside her and leans over her, hooking his foot behind her ankle under the sand; she feels his shadow across her sun-warm stomach, the drops of salt water dripping from his hair onto her collarbone and then lower. "Oh, I can finish it."_

_ "Not _here," _she says, her breath catching on the last word when he touches a cold fingertip to her stomach and begins to trace shapes on her skin. "Oh." She trembles, manages to say, "What are you," before his mouth cuts off her words._

_ She melts. _


End file.
